The Indians were there at dawn. Captain Gringo was sleeping, fully dressed, on the poncho with Diablilla up near their fire, when the girl nudged him awake and murmured, “Dick, don’t move too suddenly. Don’t say anything. Just sit up naturally. Let me do the talking.”
He rubbed his face and sat up on the poncho, still wondering what the hell she was talking about. Then he spotted the trio of naked, long-haired youths standing with their backs to the wall of brush across the way. Their privates were dangling naked in the morning breeze but each wore a string belt with a little bark quiver of tufted darts. Each held a blowgun taller than he was. Captain Gringo glanced down the line and saw nobody else was awake yet. He kept his voice down as he asked the girl, “If you can talk to them, ask them what they want and warn them that I’m going to call down the line. If anybody else wakes up unexpectedly we could have a nasty accident.”
Diablilla nodded and called out softly in a liquid bird-song language. One of the Indians nodded gravely and burbled back at her. She said, “We are in luck. They are Jivaro.”
“That’s luck? The Jivaro are the ones who shoot you full of poison darts and shrink your head, right?”
Diablilla smiled and said, “I’ll explain later. Wake the others and make sure nobody does anything silly. These boys are nervous.”
“They’re nervous? Okay, keep them chatting friendly and if I get a dart in my back I’ll probably never speak to you again.”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but Diablilla passed it on to the Jivaro and they seemed to think it was pretty funny. It was odd to hear a headhunter laugh like anyone else.
Captain Gringo nudged Gaston awake at the next poncho. He knew Gaston never leaped before he looked. He told the Frenchman, “Company for breakfast, I hope. Pass it on, and make sure nobody acts unfriendly or frightened.”
Gaston sat up yawning, spotted the Jivaro, and muttered, “Merde alors. I have seen pictures of that breed. They are Jivaro headhunters!”
“So Diablilla tells me. She can speak their dialect so she must know something we don’t know, unless she’s one hell of an actress.”
He moved back to hunker down beside the girl as Diablilla said something in Jivaro. One of the youths put his blowgun down and gingerly came forward to accept the small paper packet Diablilla held out to him. He squatted near the edge of the poncho, opened his small gift, and tasted. Then he grinned happily and called out to his friends. They grinned too as, down the line, somebody sat up and sobbed, “¡Madre de Dios!” before Gaston could silence him.
The Jivaro ignored the byplay since they’d obviously found themselves among friendly people. Captain Gringo asked about the gift and she replied, “Salt. It’s the one thing they value more than anything else.”
“Hmm, this far from the sea, it figures there’d be a shortage of salt. Tell them there’s more where that came from. But I’m missing something, doll. These guys are Jivaro headhunters and those are blowguns they’re packing, right?”
The three Jivaro began to share the salt, eating it like sugar candy, as Diablilla said, “I have met Jivaro before, with my poor father. They are headhunters, it is true. But people misunderstand their motives. The Jivaro only take and shrink the heads of their enemies. The shrunken head is not a war trophy. It is for the protection of the victor and his family against the ghost of the man he had to kill. They believe that the ghosts of the dead live in the heads of dead enemies, so if one shrinks the head, one shrinks the ghost. If one sews up all the openings and guards the head well, the ghost, even a little ghost, cannot get out to haunt one.”
“Sympathetic magic, huh? What about those weapons?”
“Those are not weapons of war, Dick. They use the darts for to hunt small game. If a Jivaro wishes for to kill you, he uses his bow or machete like anyone else. You can see these boys are not out for to fight anyone. They are hunting monkeys and birds.”
“Well, there goes another illusion. Since you’re still alive, you must know what you’re talking about. I thought you were crazy when you said they were friendly, but I’m beginning to believe you. Look at ’em go for that salt.”
Diablilla smiled fondly at the desperate-looking trio and said, “The Jivaro are one of the friendliest tribes in the lowlands, if one understands their ways.”
“And if you don’t understand them?”
“Well, we did see some shrunken heads that looked like they may have once been white men when my father and I last visited some Jivaro. The story of their ferocity is not completely a myth, Dick. They are good fighters, if they feel you are not their friend.”
“Hey, give ’em some more salt. If we can get them to guide us through to some landing where we can beg, borrow or steal a boat …”
But Diablilla put a hand on his sleeve to silence him as she said, “No. That is what I mean by misunderstandings in the past, Dick. The very first rule you must know in dealing with the Jivaro is, do not ever ask a Jivaro to do anything!”
“Not even if you ask politely?”
“That could be even worse. If you yell a demand at a Jivaro warrior he may think you are joking and just laugh. But, you see, they are very gentle people among themselves. So the tribal elders never shout orders. They just suggest politely that a younger follower do something. These boys would surely do anything we asked them to, within reason. They are trained to obey their elders, but …”
“Right, the elders would resent it like hell and gently suggest somebody shrink our heads a lot. I’m glad you came along, doll. Aside from the reasons we discussed last night. I’m beginning to see there’s more to making friends in this neck of the woods than I thought. A lot of missionaries who wound up dead could have used someone like you to chat with the natives for them.”
The youth she’d given the salt to chirped at Diablilla, and when she answered, he shook his head in an agitated manner and kept pointing to the southeast as if it was an awfully shitty place.
Captain Gringo listened to the odd lingo, trying to follow the drift. He was pretty good at picking up on odd dialects. He’d been one of the few officers or men in the old Indian fighting army who’d bothered to ask their Indian scouts to teach them a few words of Pueblo or Apache. Knowing the difference had once saved his ass, and on another occasion it had prevented a needless atrocity when he’d been ordered to ‘pacify’ the wrong Indians.
But Jivaro obviously was not related to either Uto-Aztec nor Nadene. It sounded like it had been made up aboard a roller coaster. It went up to falsetto tweets and dropped to guttural grunts. He knew Diablilla was cold sober, but if he’d just come in, he’d have thought she was drunk from the expression on her pretty face as she and the Indian chatted. He knew each lingo had its own gestures and facial expressions that went with the words and that she’d fallen into them automatically. Along with what she’d already told them, it was small wonder everyone thought the Jivaro were pretty weird. They looked and sounded weird as hell.
The three Indians suddenly took off without ceremony. As they vanished into the jungle gloom like silent ghosts, Diablilla turned to Captain Gringo and the others to say, “Those boys said we should avoid Gueppi and stay away from any riverbanks until we work our way far east.”
“Any particular reason, or are we talking about more odd native customs?”
“They said there are flagelado slave raiders hunting up and down the rivers. They have steam launches and repeating rifles. Those boys are from a band that was driven far south of their usual hunting grounds by others just as bad. They say they are afraid to go farther south, but that their wise men think they are safe enough for now in this part of the selva.”
He pursed his lips and said, “I can see why the Indians are afraid to go near the water, but we’re not Indians. So what the hell.”
Diablilla shook her head and explained, “The Jivaro say being a mestizo or even a blanco is not much help. The raiders are taking everyone they meet.”
“Hey, that’ll be the fucking day! Did they tell you what all this flesh peddling is about, Diablilla?”
“They were a bit confused, but I think I was able to put it all together from what they told me. The flagelados are working for big rubber companies. They need latex tappers. A lot of latex tappers. The price of crude rubber has climbed to an all-time high on the world market. But one only gets a little latex from each tree, and the wild rubber trees stand widely spaced in the selva. The Jivaro told me the raiders have even seized Colombian troopers and put them to work. I think they have something else in mind in chasing Jivaro. It is of course impossible to hold a male Indian captive very long in his own selva, but the Jivaro girls are very pretty and the houses of ill-repute in Manaus pay well for exotic imports. The new rich rubber barons find it exciting to be vile with something different.”
Captain Gringo grimaced and said, ‘They sound like keen guys.” He looked up at Gaston, who’d drifted over to join them, and asked, “Still want to go to Manaus?”
The dapper little Frenchman shrugged and replied, “Oui, it may be amusing at the House of a Thousand Variations these days. We are on the wild frontier here, Dick. Conditions will be more civilized farther to the east. Manaus has an opera house and police force in addition to its wide-open wickedness. A certain amount of public order is required if only because it’s good for business. Nobody will attack us on the streets of the jungle metropolis. At least, not on the. well-lit streets.”
The American nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yeah, I remember Nuevo Laredo on a Saturday night. Hey, Nunez?”
The rebel who’d guided them over the mountains came closer and Captain Gringo said, “We have to work our way east to civilization the hard way. The Indians tell us Gueppi and the river may be a bad move. Any other ideas?”
Nunez said, “No, señor. I was getting lost in any case once we left the trail in the fog forests. I have never been this far east. I have never heard of traveling through the selvas away from the riverbanks. I am not sure this is possible.”
Captain Gringo waved expansively at the cathedral gloom around them and said, “It has to be. The Indians do it all the time. You just keep walking between the trees. How far due east would you figure Manaus could be?”
Nunez said he had no idea. Gaston said, “I make it a little under a thousand miles, Dick.”
“A thousand what? Jesus, Gaston, that’s one hell of a walk!”
“Oui, I tend to agree. That is why sensible people use steam boats in Amazonia, my overactive lad. In addition to being trés fatigue, have you considered we have no compass?”
Captain Gringo glanced upward as he realized he’d been about to say something dumb about navigating by the sun. He said, “Well, the land slopes to the east,” and Gaston replied, “Only for a little ways. We shall soon be walking in circles on dead-flat terrain. We’ll be out of food in another day or so, and please do not tell me we can live off the country. Game is sparse in Amazonia. That is why the Indians must shoot birds and monkeys out of the trees. We have as many mouths to feed as the average Indian band and they barely manage, despite being raised in this confusion!”
The American thought and decided. “Okay, we’re going to split the difference. We’ll work our way east of this war zone and then cut over to some settlement or other and see about something that can float us down to Manaus.” He turned to Diablilla and asked, “Did the Jivaro tell you what settlement the slave raiders are working out of?”
She said, “They don’t visit towns, so they don’t know the names of any, but I was able to learn that the flagelados are most active along the Rio Putumayo and that they raid as far north as the headwaters of La Caqueta.”
He frowned and said, “Hey, aren’t we south of La Caqueta?”
“Yes, Dick. That was why the Jivaro warned us to be careful.”