Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/420

404 hard wood, are styled war-arrows, while a fourth kind, the only one having a metal point, is reserved for the tapir.

In hunting this animal—an important feature in the life of the young Cainguá—they display all their knowledge and all their skill. Perched on high trees or hidden in the underwood, they wait for the animal to pass, and wound it mortally with their steel-pointed arrows. A merciless pursuit then begins, and does not end till the timid, harassed pachyderm dies of exhaustion. The chase of the jaguar is more perilous, and sometimes ends in a fight at close quarters.

The Cainguá also set traps, and sometimes travel for hours in the underbrush to visit them, with their arms in their hands and their provisions in their bocco, or basket made of caraguáto fibers, which they carry slung over their shoulders. When game is scarce, or indolence keeps them in their lodges, they hunt the rats and field mice that swarm in their winter's provisions; the victims, slain with sticks, are immediately put upon the fire just as they are, and devoured on the spot.

Work in the house and the fields devolves upon the women. They carry their burdens on their backs in a pretty basket. They make blackish earthen vessels out of a clay which they go a considerable distance to get. Another finer earth is the material of a pipe in which the husband smokes the leaves of a wild tobacco. Contrary to the Paraguayans, the women do not smoke. In one family we saw a horn spoon like that of the Lengua Indians of the Chaco. Aside from the dogs and the hens which only the rich possess, the Cainguá have no domestic animals. The parrots which are seen quite numerously in the villages, tied by one foot to a light clog, are there only as a reserve for the kitchen.

The only formality which the swain has to go through to get the hand of his promised one is to kill a tapir, an act by which he proves that he will be capable of supporting his prospective family. The death of a tapir under such conditions is quite an event; the whole tribe assembles at the carcass, and a scene of gluttony begins that does not cease till nothing is left but the skin and bones of the "great beast." That is the only ceremony of marriage. The Cainguá is usually monogamous, but polygamy is allowed. Marriages of relatives are carefully avoided. After confinement, the young mother has a rest of a few days before resuming her servile task. She carries the newborn infant in a scarf, or sort of little hammock slung over her shoulders. She does not think of weaning it for a year and a half or two years, while the child has already been exercised in arms with miniature bows. Ideas of cleanliness seem foreign to the women as well as to the men, and it is a lucky chance that will induce them to comb their magnificent heads of hair.