Head Hunters of the Amazon | Page 6

on the invitation of my friend the "Count," expecting to find all sorts of commercial possibilities opened up by reason of the standing of his family, and their intelligent grasp of the country's needs and, when I first arrived I was not disappointed.
It is a wonderful experience to ride through the cacao country at night. Everywhere swarm gigantic fire-flies as big as June-bugs; they carry two greenish-yellow headlights which are always burning as well as the usual intermittent light under the body. It is as if the insect world were holding a great f?te throughout the plantations.
Once clear of the cacao district, we started to climb through the forest, having set foot on the first slope of the Andes. The monotony of the flat littoral, the strip of country lying between the Pacific and the Andes, was broken at last, and it was there that the mules demonstrated their superiority as saddle-animals.
Arrived at La Delicia, after passing over the scarcely used trail which ran up through some of the undeveloped C��rdovez holdings, with the boy riding ahead to cut away the brush which had overgrown the trail since last it was used, we called a halt. La Delicia was the headquarters of Don Agosto C��rdovez, famous for his picturesque cursing of the peons, one of the six or seven sons of the old man who managed for their father the various plantations and ranches on the vast estate. There we stopped for a delightful week or ten days to rest our mules, and for me to be introduced to forest and plantation life. It was my first experience of anything of the kind, so the novelty of even the most ordinary events of every-day life in such places appealed to me very strongly, as it would to any person with a love of outdoor life. I went hunting monkeys, turkeys, wild pigs, parrots, deer and jaguars, none of which I had ever shot before. The monkeys in particular, I remember, excited my enthusiasm, never having seen them outside a cage before. As novel as the hunting was the eating of many of these strange forest-dwellers. The impression my first taste of monkey made on me stands out clear in my memory. The gastronomical possibilities of a baboon probably occur to only a very few of the millions who gaze at him through iron bars.
I was introduced, too, to the arts of tapping rubber trees, making rum and sugar, collecting pl?tanos and yuca (bananas and arrowroot are the staple foods in the hot country of Ecuador), and blazing forest trails. Generally when out hunting I was accompanied by an Indian, but when I started to go alone I had to learn not to lose my way in the endless labyrinth of trees and plants. At first I gave the natives a good laugh. In my anxiety not to lose myself I did my best to open up a trail wide enough for a horse and cart, glancing back every now and again to see if the way home was clear; many a time since that day have I appreciated to the full what those peons must have thought of me.
All too quickly came the day when Domingo C��rdovez announced that we must move on. Our destination was Riobamba, to reach which a long trail must be covered. So we set off on the much-used trail over which the mule trains pass every fortnight with the rum for consumption in the interior.
Rum plays such an important part in every peon's life that it is worth a few words. It is made from fermented cane-juice, its alcohol content being so great that it burns like methylated spirits. It tastes like a mixture of benzine and molasses. Life among the peons in Ecuador is one long string of fiestas in which the principal part is played by this spirit, which truly deserves the name of fire-water. For most peons a fiesta has no other significance than an excuse for drinking himself into a blessed state of oblivion, in that state the cares of the world trouble him not. From one fiesta to another they go, always in a state of semi-torpor, when not actually unconscious. If it happens that, by some grave oversight, there is a week without a public fiesta according to the Saints' Calendar, a private one is arranged. The drink was worth when I was there $1.20 per 120 litres. Thus for one cent a man could attain to the ideal state for about twenty-four hours. Even the peons could afford that.
The trail from La Delicia to Riobamba is reckoned first-class. It is, as a matter of fact, composed, on the level stretches, of a sea of mud, while on the gradients it has two distinct halves, one for ascending and