Dance of the Dwarfs (13 page)

As soon as Joaquín arrived I had to feed and mildly intoxicate him. What he wanted was to eat food from cans, especially the more colorful and tasteless American emergency rations. With such luxuries about, it was no use to offer him a steak of swamp deer, lovingly tended by Teresa over a charcoal fire and brushed with chili sauce from an old tobacco tin. I was compelled to wait patiently until he had stuffed himself and slept, so we had no time to go far up or down the creek.

His examination was impressively professional. He translated the scuffles in the dust as rats and a capybara—which had been lying in the rushes for some time until it finally decided to get the hell out into the damper forest. I gathered that I was a disgrace for not shooting and eating it. I have never even seen it.

No deer. No peccary. Remains of a porcupine which had been turned over on its back by somebody's quick and daring paw and eaten out. Joaquín thought one of the smaller felines was probably responsible. He showed me a snake track which had ruffled the surface of the creek more plainly than feet, and told me how I could distinguish between the venomous snakes and the constrictors. The slow wriggles of the former made a wider path than the fast, hunting wriggles of the latter.

He also found the light imprint of a biggish clawed foot in what had been mud a few days before. Not puma, he said; it was an animal which chased its prey rather than stalked it, because it had five digits. It could be the track of the giant Brazilian otter, he thought, and the web might not show. I again talked around the question of dogs, not mentioning duendes but knowing that Joaquín would remember my inquisitiveness of two weeks earlier. He refused to be drawn, only saying sententiously that dogs could live tame or wild.

When we got back to the estancia he distinguished himself by asking if I would give him Chucha when I left. He reminded us that his wife was dead and proudly patted his pants, assuring us that he had an excellent erection as well as a house. He was prepared, he said (being now full of rum) to fertilize any of my laboratory plants which needed such intimate magic. Before Chucha's arrival I should probably have encouraged him to go ahead and measure results, if any. But simplicity in the male is not so attractive as in the female. I may be wrong in calling it simplicity. Joaquín's ritual mating with food plants is religious and therefore essentially complicated.

I had to get him away in good time. No estancia after dusk for Joaquín! He fell off twice on the way back, quickly remounting in case he should go to sleep where he was. Then I rode Pichón home through the early night, leading Estrellera. That's forty-eight miles in the day, and they are only healthily tired. Mario is at his old tricks again and insists that I must not travel after sunset. He gave me the impression that there was still some part of the Manuel Cisneros story which I have not heard.

[
April 27, Wednesday
]

A statement of intention to be compared with what actually happens—generally a source of amusement and disillusion!

It is obviously useless to spend a night in the pitch blackness of the forest, and explorations by day very possibly frighten away whatever I am trying to find. If I want to catch Homo Dawnayensis going about his business, I must watch the border of forest and llano at dusk or dawn when its abounding life is active.

My choice would be the bay of parkland where Chucha and I found the dead bullock, somewhere within sight of that tunnel. But it would mean starting improbably early without any good excuse. Nearer home, just inside my first cut passage, there is a half dead caju tree choked by lianas and easy to climb. From the top I shall have a fair view of the llano and of patches of the forest floor between the trunks. Meanwhile Estrellera can graze in peace. She has no nerves and will reach up and munch any tall tuft of grass instead of shying at the rattle of the seeds like Tesoro.

I wish it was not necessary to lie, but for the time being it is. I have announced that I shall be off in the dark tomorrow morning to catch a morning flight of geese far up the marshes. Mario considers the east side safe. Actually—if one wades—it is the only dangerous place for miles. Electric eel and stingray must be in a filthy temper, assuming they have tempers, at the shrinking level of the water.

Walking to the caju tree is too slow, so I must take Estrellera though I would rather not. There's a risk of her fetching up in a cooking pot if hunting dwarfs exist. Alternatively, if they don't, my hypothetical outlaw has an excellent chance of riding off to Venezuela. A corollary to that. If he wants to escape, why doesn't he sneak over the wall and steal a horse? Or is he a tropical Herne the Hunter who enjoys living where he is? Nothing makes sense.

[
April 28, Thursday
]

What you think your eye is recording has more relation to your beliefs than to facts. I had in mind, when I wrote that, the forest duendes compounded of one half vegetable and one half fear. So I must be very careful. I think that what I have seen is conclusive, but the light was bad, the foliage thick, and my excitement was so mixed with cowardliness that I could not separate them. Probably psychic researchers feel the same, and therefore cold, material evidence is harder to come by than it need be.

I started at 3:30 A.M., taking the 16-bore, chiefly because I had to be seen carrying it when I returned to the estancia. It is also a fast and deadly weapon for self-protection at close quarters when loaded with No. 2 shot. I wanted No. 4 for geese, but could find none in Bogotá. No. 2 turns out to be right for medium-sized ground game.

A half moon was setting which made it unnecessary to use a torch until I was beneath the caju tree. There darkness was absolute, and I had to show light in order to see exactly where I was and what was inhabiting the tree. I disturbed three or four marmosets which cleared off with faint squeaks of protest. The only other sound was of Estrellera crunching dead stalks a safe hundred yards away.

It was still dark when I settled myself in a triple fork of the tree some thirty feet above ground. There was a very light breeze blowing from the forest, so that nothing could scent me or see me. I would of course have been heard—but that was as likely to attract as to repel any creature which lived by hunting. The first chorus of birds began. Before the howler monkeys drowned out all other sounds I heard the very distant call of a jaguar and again that full-volumed, tenor whistle which had puzzled me the first day on the ridge.

Life was all in the treetops except for doves and finches working along the edge of the llano. There was no ground game about at all. This should be significant, but I know too little of the reasons why sometimes there should be plenty and sometimes none. From what I have read of Africa, a lion's kill does not frighten the herds into running far; on the other hand hunting by man can clear the district. But I doubt if any parallel can be drawn. There are no herds under and just outside the trees but peccary.

Behind me to the east the gray light was growing. I could not help suffering from a compulsive instinct that I had been seen and that eyes were looking at me. I reminded myself that a dozen creatures were probably looking down at me from the roof of the forest and wondering whether the very large monkey was harmful.

I did not feel affected by loneliness as I had on the north side of the ridge, and I can rule that out as a cause of possible hallucination. If there was loneliness it was nearer to the anxiety neurosis of a man in a fairground, unamused by the racket going on around him and resentful of a crowd safe and completely unconcerned with him. Eyes were certainly unsettled by the impact on ears, so that instead of quiet, thorough observation, I was continually glancing upwards, at the same time trying not to move my head.

To my left I could see a lot of the forest floor before the tree trunks closed the view. To my right front was a nightmare of lianas, which could have passed as an abstract painter's impression of dying forest. No one who did not know the reality would guess that the bare streaks radiating down from the top left-hand corner to fill the whole canvas were photographically exact. The lianas, black, gray and dark green against a background of grays and blacks, fell straight as storm rain, then curving away from the trees to their own roots. Seen from my height the pattern was as complicated as that of a vast rush basket.

Beyond and through this tangle I twice thought I saw movement. Distance could not be estimated, for thin ropes and thick ropes were so intermingled that perspective was unreliable. When I spotted the duende, it was not less than thirty yards away. I could not have seen it at all unless at the same time it had been trying to get a clearer view of me. I was reassured by our common motive of curiosity. It was really there.

It was not a monkey. It was dancing up and down to look at me from behind liana stems which approached the horizontal. No American monkey would have done that, but would have pulled itself up by arms or tail. It was not the butt of a rotten liana in an inexplicable state of instability, for it had a face. It was a dwarf all right, but unfortunately I could never see the face in profile which would have helped me to decide whether he was as human as myself or somewhat lower down the family tree.

His ears were not prominent. He seemed to have a small beard, but the light was so bad that I could not tell its color or the color of skin. Height was impossible to judge with any precision. Assuming he was standing on the ground and that the rest of him was proportionate to head and shoulders I reckon height as not less than forty two inches, not more than fifty. The eyes were indistinguishable but the straightforward stare seemed to make binocular vision quite certain. The jack-in-the-box jumps were rather like those of a stoat or weasel popping up to get a view over intervening undergrowth. If that is the dwarfs' technique of hunting, one might easily get the impression of a dance. I may have been looking at two of them. I think now that I was.

It was my usually quiet Estrellera who demoralized me. There was a hardly perceptible freshening of the dawn wind. At once she neighed in alarm and was off across the llano with the painful, clumsy rabbit hops of a hobbled horse. Up till then I had been fascinated and half skeptical—still ready to accept one of the startling freaks of radical leaves which account for most duendes—but now I remembered that I was a sitting target against the gray gold of dawn and that, as Estrellera's behavior proved the dwarfs to be real, the missile which stopped a jaguar could be real too. Leaving that out, one of the normal weapons of the forest Indian is a curare-tipped dart shot from a blowpipe. A deep scratch, and that—at any rate for birds and monkeys—is it.

However, I had undoubtedly been seen, so nothing would be lost if I could summon up enough guts to show myself openly and emphasize my peaceful intentions. In case they knew what a gun was, I laid it across two branches behind me and stood up with hands spread out and down, which I hoped was an interhuman gesture that they would understand. I then beckoned to him or them to approach. I also threw down my machete and made faces to indicate that it was a present.

Nothing happened. I was aware of the utter inadequacy of my attempts to communicate, yet I suppose the conquerors when meeting potentially hostile Indians could do little better. I kept telling myself that if anyone got up from behind the lianas to shoot at me I should have time to swing round the trunk into cover. It then occurred to me that any hunter, having once attracted attention to the lianas, would make a circuit into the open woodland and shoot from behind a tree. I had no possible cover from that side; so I forced myself to wave a hand and smile a sickly smile like royalty from a glass coach, shinned down the tree into the bushes and got out fast by the cut passage.

Estrellera was still legging it across the llano, which gave me an excuse to run after her. When I caught her she was damp with sweat and needed a lot of gentling before I dared untie the hobbles. Why on earth should she have been so terrified? For her anything vaguely human is a possible friend carrying possible nourishment. I have known her to extend her lips towards a large tame monkey in the hope of getting half his sweet potato. It was the monkey which was alarmed by her greedy and affectionate approach.

Do the dwarfs anoint themselves with jaguar fat or glands? An ingenious theory which would account for her instinctive dash away from the edge of the cover. My own sense of smell—invaluable for detecting fine botanical distinctions—is exceptionally well trained, but the richness of the forest border at dawn drowns all individual scents. I think that I did pick up a faint, musky effluvium, though I cannot be quite sure.

I did not ride home immediately since Mario and Chucha would have noticed that I came from the forest, not from the east side of the marshes. So I walked Estrellera along the wall of trees—well out of range—with the red ball of the sun now hurling its first heat at us. When we were south of the estancia and out of sight I crossed the creek. It is possible that the dancers were moving on a parallel course. The monkeys were certainly hurling abuse at something below.

Teresa's scrawny and hideous hens had been doing their duty while I was away, so there was an excellent and very welcome breakfast. My violent prejudice against canned foods admits one exception. American bacon is superb. Chucha wanted to know why I had no geese and why I came from the south. That was easy. I told her that I had slipped the wrong cartridges into my pocket and found it out too late; so I had gone down the creek in the hope of putting up a capybara in the rushes.

I had to open up a couple of cartridges and show her the difference between No. 2 and No. 5. She was not suspicious. The little love is always eager to understand what I am doing and why I do it, and I am as eager to satisfy her curiosity. Chuchas taught to university standard might be a greater gift to the world than wheats which resisted our extremes of drought and tropical rain. But one dream is as fantastic as the other. I doubt if I shall live to see the day when there are sheets of water above the dams and mile after mile of crops and homesteads on the llanos. And I wonder if the hunting ape which is me would not then be homesick for the remembered heat and emptiness.