Dance of the Dwarfs (12 page)

I did not attempt to answer that. She might have understood if I had preached that the end did not always justify the means; but to explain why the end could never be reached at all was too difficult. Her simplicity is utterly different from that of Pedro and almost religious in its anxiety for the helpless. I wonder what would have happened if Karl Marx had founded his fantasies on primitive Christianity. Hippies in place of political economists?

This is all to the good because I can now allow her to think that my absences are due to close collaboration with these heavily-armed saviors of mankind. I hope she never tells Valera so, or I shall be in trouble with the government as well.

[
April 24, Sunday
]

Today I set out on Estrellera, taking my only other compass which is hardly more than a toy; but since I am not surveying, merely searching at random for signs of unknown pygmies, it is good enough.

When we reached the end of the long glade I hobbled the mare and turned her loose to graze while I scrambled up the low barrier cliff. From the top I could identify the sloping rock where I had laid out my presents, but it was far away and the green square of nylon was invisible.

Progress along the length of the ridge was out of the question. Thick scrub and badly eroded ground. Since nobody knew where I was or ever would, any accident such as a broken ankle could be deadly. So I remounted Estrellera and explored new ground, following the southern escarpment of the ridge.

There at last was game. I heard the distant rustling and clicking of a herd of peccary and caught a glimpse of a great anteater. Then, when I was searching on foot for a route to the ridge I put up a swamp deer and dropped it with a fluke of a snap shot right behind the shoulder.

This proved that there must be marsh or a small tributary of the Guaviare somewhere near and probably more breaks in the forest cover. A vegetarian tribe of dwarfs, living on roots and whatever fruit the monkeys dropped from the trees, always seemed to me most improbable. That hypothesis might now be rejected. If they existed, they were hunters. A game warden or zoologist could probably gain some clue to their movements from the presence or absence of the peccary, but I have no experience.

After lashing my deer on Estrellera, I found a ravine up which I could lead her as far as a patch of dappled sunlight. The going was easier than on the northern side, but I was floundering about for over an hour before I reached the flat rock. The nails and beads were undisturbed. The dried fish had gone, which was not surprising. Vulture or tayra or any of the forest rats could have taken it.

The silence on the top of the ridge still brooded, but I was not at all afraid as I had been on my first visit. Then the loneliness of the place possibly affected me. Now, the presence of abundant life in the forest below and the exhilaration of killing my deer stone dead without conscious sighting of the rifle gave a saner self-confidence. One must obviously be cautious among all these holes and boulders, especially when confined in a narrow cleft between rocks, but I have not seen or heard anything bigger than a beetle.

Home without incident. I must have traveled nearly thirty difficult miles. I asked Chucha if she minded being left alone all day. She looked blank. She had never conceived any other possibility. Men work and women stay at home. So they do, for that matter, in London. My question reveals a slight sense of personal guilt, as if I
ought
to remain with her when I have nothing to do instead of dashing out to play golf with dwarfs.

She is not idle. She helps Mario to carry water, and she is cleverer than he is at digging and closing little irrigation channels with the hoe. Her lime sapling, which she treats as her personal baby, is doing miraculously well. The fruit is to be for me. I should be worried if I really believed she was thinking that far ahead. But she doesn't. The fruit is a child's dream gift, and has nothing to do with time.

Within the walls our personal food crops flourish, but all my experimental plots have had it. Grasses, wheats and leguminosae are dead except those which live under controlled conditions (see journal, p. 87 & notes). So my professional work is limited to an hour a day, and the only restriction on my explorations is that I refuse to be too tired at night. She is more desirable than ever as her confidence is freed and her youth dances. She will never be a sensualist. Too loving. Her sexual excitement, which becomes more frequent, shakes her but is quiet. A profound giving rather than a desperation.

Where the devil are the rains? With reasonable luck we should have had the first storms. My prospective little laborers can be of no immediate use now. But next year?

[
April 25, Monday
]

Today I took Chucha into the forest. I shall not take her there again until I clearly understand what danger, if any, it holds.

During last week I was not able to give enough time to her riding. If we ever had to get out of here in a hurry, it would be on Tesoro and Pichón with Estrellera for a packhorse. That would be a lot safer than a canoe out of Santa Eulalia. I don't know the shoals and rapids, nor how long it would take us to reach any sort of settlement.

She has a good seat and is getting on well. Pichón, like an old soldier, is inclined to take advantage of her gentleness. Today he nearly bucked her off just to see what would happen. What did happen was a beauty from me on his fat quarters. Chucha must learn to use the quirt herself when required.

After a few exercises we cantered straight across to the forest, entered through my first passage and then struck northwest. I had not intended to go so far from the grass, but a fearsome tangle of lianas forced us away into the big timber. As a result of her travels she was able to put a Spanish or Portuguese name to birds I did not know and to identify several small noises in the treetops. She also spotted rubber.

When we had ridden four or five miles through the darkness, the big timber opened out gradually into beautiful parkland without any definite wall of low, impenetrable growth. Here was a deep bay of the llano with what will be splendid grazing after the rains. Some small deer were over on the far side, extremely alert so that we only got a glimpse of them.

The going was safe, so I let her canter across the bay. She pulled up—or Pichón did—where the trees began to thicken again. I was tempted to show her what my intelligent Tesoro could do: gymkhana stuff which both he and I enjoy. Given his head he will go through timber, zigzagging like a startled snipe, seldom needing a touch and obeying it instantly. This time I was paid out for exhibitionism. He shied so violently that I nearly went over his withers.

What alarmed him was the carcass of a big bullock, lying half in and half out of a clump of thorn. There at last was certain evidence of jaguar. The neck was dislocated, the ribs were broken and one hindquarter had been completely torn off. The skin, where it was exposed to the sun, was dried and hard. Back and rump showed the stripes of the claws where the jaguar landed. The forepart of the beast was picked nearly clean. Rats and a largish lizard—of some species which I do not know—were worrying at the remaining flesh under the safety of the thorns.

There was still a noticeable furrow in the grass along which I assumed the jaguar had dragged the haunch. I told Chucha to wait for me well out in the open and followed up the trail with some vague hope of getting a shot, though the jaguar must have finished his meal days earlier and would now be far away looking for another.

What I actually reached was the scene of the crime, showing that I do not yet know enough to be sure which way an animal went, towards me or away from me. The bullock had charged into the thickest stuff he could find, going through it like a bulldozer in the hope of scraping the jaguar off his back. Further on, a patch of shrubby growth twenty yards across was beaten down in evidence of the fight. The jaguar must have been very hungry to tackle the bullock at all, a much heavier and more powerful beast than the peccary and deer which were his usual prey. He had at last killed it, eaten what he wanted and then dragged the whole beast into the thorns.

I returned to the kill to see what more I could discover. Since he had not left the remains of the haunch at either spot, he must have taken it with him. It looked as if he had been disturbed while in the middle of breakfast.

Unless he had taken to the open llano, which was unlikely, there was only one way he could have gone: through a marked tunnel in the forest wall, which on that side of the bay was thick. I could not tell whether he made the tunnel or merely used it. It led me on hands and knees back into the forest. And there, not more than fifty yards from the outside world, were the haunch and the jaguar.

The accident which caused his death seemed obvious. He had jumped for a branch some twenty feet above his head, using the trunk of the tree to get there as the slashes made by his hind claws revealed. The branch had broken and was hanging down. It was an odd way for any cat to die; they do not misjudge the strength of branches, and even a heavy jaguar, powerful enough to drag a bullock, would surely only be winded by a fall onto softish ground. He might have intended to store the haunch in an upstairs larder, but its position some little distance away suggested that he had dropped it before he jumped.

Birds had torn open throat and belly, but had by no means finished their job of clearing up. Curiosity compelled me to brave the stench. When I examined the back to see if it had been broken by the fall I felt a sudden revulsion as if an agile centipede had threatened my hand. It was overwhelming surprise rather than nervousness. The jaguar's death was similar to Pedro's, though not an exact parallel. The beast had been shot from the flank, either on the ground or in the act of springing. The bullet had pierced the spine at the top vertebra rather than the base of the skull, and there were two neat wounds. This could be meaningless coincidence. I think it was. The projectile had probably been deflected by the skull and emerged nearly opposite to the wound of entry.

Two possibilities presented themselves: (I) that the pygmies had developed a far more efficient bow than other Indians—a weapon at least equivalent to the old English longbow and war arrow—or that they had a heavy spear and spear-thrower. Alternatively they netted their game or entangled the legs with bolas, then despatching even such dangerous enemies as the jaguar and Pedro with dagger blows at the base of the skull; (2) that somebody in fear of his life from government or guerrillas was living in the forest and competing with the other carnivores for food. He was evidently a first-class shot and would not go hungry. He may well have wanted a steak of that fresh-killed beef.

The latter hypothesis seems the more likely. Pedro mistook him for one of the llaneros, took a shot at him and was instantly killed in return. On the other hand Mario, Pedro and Joaquín have all talked of dancing dwarfs. If I reject this story entirely, I fall into the common scientific error of postulating a complicated cause when the available facts point to a more simple and elegant solution.

I went back for Tesoro and then joined Chucha on the llano. She had not been at all alarmed by the carcass of the bullock, which was as it should be. She was familiar enough with the remains of beasts stranded on the river sandbanks along with other flotsam. When I told her of the dead jaguar, she was eager to see it. There may have been a purely Indian touch of triumph over the dreaded enemy.

To avoid the labor of cutting a way for the horses we rode through the border of parkland on the south side of the bay and then made the circuit through the trees. When at last I found the animal, nose helping where eyes failed, I asked her if she thought it could have been killed by Indians—on the off chance that she might have heard how the river tribes tackled a jaguar. She did not know, but believed they would have cut out the claws for personal decoration. She made the intelligent suggestion that the holes might have been made by a vulture hammering with its beak to get at brains or marrow. Not a bad theory for the jaguar, but I won't have it for Pedro. His wounds were too neat.

She never questioned my explanation, backed up by the broken branch, that the jaguar had been killed by its fall. She took the episode as a mere casual curiosity. It looked as if I had cured her of any obsession with dwarfs and duendes.

On our way home I noticed that the merciless, lunar heat of yesterday and today had put end to the creek. It was a checkerboard of cracked, dried mud as hard as a brick pavement. Even the horses left no recognizable hoof-marks. I wish now that I had regularly ridden up and down the banks while there was still enough mud to show tracks. That would have been more sensible than searching the forest at random. Perhaps I have accepted too readily this won't-cross-water stuff. One is hypnotized by the desolation of the llano in the searing sunlight. Even at night I have seen no animal life but one agouti and one puma/dog.

Early tomorrow I shall ride to Santa Eulalia, leading Pichón, and see if I can persuade Joaquín to come out. He has not been here for weeks. There are untranslatable scufflings in the dust which may mean something to him.

[
April 26, Tuesday
]

A more or less successful day—though Joaquín is firmly set against any suggestion of small, bare feet and will not discuss the unmentionable. The trees are too near to talk indiscreetly about duendes, which do not, anyway, leave visible tracks.

Chucha was far from impressed by him. Joaquín is the last ragged remnant of the shamans of primitive food-gatherers, whereas she descends from the Children of the Sun. She does not herself express the difference like that, since in fact she knows far less than I do of her Peruvian ancestors. She merely says that Joaquín is a filthy old pig who is too fond of the demon rum. He is a pig, but a most interesting one. I suppose one must be secure upon the heights of civilization before one can start stirring up the bottom levels with profit and pleasure.