We sat in tucum hammocks, suspended between the upright posts of the shed.The young woman with the blue mouth-- who, although married, was as shy as any young maiden of her race--soon became employed in scalding and plucking fowls for the dinner near the fire on the ground at the other end of the dwelling.The son-in-law, Pedro-uassu, and Cardozo now began a long conversation on the subject of their deceased wife, daughter, and comadre.[Co-mother; the term expressing the relationship of a mother to the godfather of her child.] It appeared she had died of consumption--"tisica," as they called it, a word adopted by the Indians from the Portuguese.The widower repeated over and over again, in nearly the same words, his account of her illness, Pedro chiming in like a chorus, and Cardozo moralising and condoling.I thought the cauim (grog) had a good deal to do with the flow of talk and warmth of feeling of all three; the widower drank and wailed until he became maundering, and finally fell asleep.I left them talking, and took a long ramble into the forest, Pedro sending his grandson, a smiling well-behaved lad of about fourteen years of age, to show me the paths, my companion taking with him his Zarabatana, or blow-gun.This instrument is used by all the Indian tribes on the Upper Amazons.It is generally nine or ten feet long, and is made of two separate lengths of wood, each scooped out so as to form one-half of the tube.To do this with the necessary accuracy requires an enormous amount of patient labour, and considerable mechanical ability, the tools used being simply the incisor teeth of the Paca and Cutia.The two half tubes, when finished, are secured together by a very close and tight spirally-wound strapping, consisting of long flat strips of Jacitara, or the wood of the climbing palm-tree; and the whole is smeared afterwards with black wax, the production of a Melipona bee.The pipe tapers towards the muzzle, and a cup-shaped mouthpiece, made of wood, is fitted in the broad end.A full-sized Zarabatana is heavy, and can only be used by an adult Indian who has had great practice.The young lads learn to shoot with smaller and lighter tubes.When Mr.Wallace and I had lessons at Barra in the use of the blow-gun, of Julio, a Juri Indian, then in the employ of Mr.Hauxwell, an English bird-collector, we found it very difficult to hold steadily the long tubes.The arrows are made from the hard rind of the leaf-stalks of certain palms, thin strips being cut, and rendered as sharp as needles by scraping the ends with a knife or the tooth of an animal.They are winged with a little oval mass of samauma silk (from the seed-vessels of the silk-cotton tree, Eriodendron samauma), cotton being too heavy.The ball of samauma should fit to a nicety the bore of the blowgun; when it does so, the arrow can be propelled with such force by the breath that it makes a noise almost as loud as a pop-gun on flying from the muzzle.My little companion was armed with a quiver full of these little missiles, a small number of which, sufficient for the day's sport, were tipped with the fatal Urari poison.The quiver was an ornamental affair, the broad rim being made of highly-polished wood of a rich cherry-red colour (the Moira-piranga, or redwood of the Japura).The body was formed of neatly-plaited strips of Maranta stalks, and the belt by which it was suspended from the shoulder was decorated with cotton fringes and tassels.
We walked about two miles along a well-trodden pathway, through high caapoeira (second-growth forest).A large proportion of the trees were Melastomas, which bore a hairy yellow fruit, nearly as large and as well flavoured as our gooseberry.The season, however, was nearly over for them.The road was bordered every inch of the way by a thick bed of elegant Lycopodiums.An artificial arrangement of trees and bushes could scarcely have been made to wear so finished an appearance as this naturally decorated avenue.The path at length terminated at a plantation of mandioca, the largest I had yet seen since I left the neighbourhood of Para.There were probably ten acres of cleared land, and part of the ground was planted with Indian corn, water-melons, and sugar cane.Beyond this field there was only a faint hunter's track, leading towards the untrodden interior.My companion told me he had never heard of there being any inhabitants in that direction (the south).We crossed the forest from this place to another smaller clearing, and then walked, on our road home, through about two miles of caapoeira of various ages, the sites of old plantations.The only fruits of our ramble were a few rare insects and a Japu (Cassicus cristatus), a handsome bird with chestnut and saffron-coloured plumage, which wanders through the tree-tops in large flocks.My little companion brought this down from a height which I calculated at thirty yards.The blow-gun, however, in the hands of an expert adult Indian, can be made to propel arrows so as to kill at a distance of fifty and sixty yards.The aim is most certain when the tube is held vertically, or nearly so.It is a far more useful weapon in the forest than a gun, for the report of a firearm alarms the whole flock of birds or monkeys feeding on a tree, while the silent poisoned dart brings the animals down one by one until the sportsman has a heap of slain by his side.None but the stealthy Indian can use it effectively.The poison, which must be fresh to kill speedily, is obtained only of the Indians who live beyond the cataracts of the rivers flowing from the north, especially the Rio Negro and the Japura.Its principal ingredient is the wood of the Strychnos toxifera, a tree which does not grow in the humid forests of the river plains.A most graphic account of the Urari, and of an expedition undertaken in search of the tree in Guiana, has been given by Sir Robert Schomburgk.[Annals and Magazine of Natural History, vol.vii.P.
411.]
