Resources for Gold Prospectors, Metal Detectorists, Treasure Hunters and Explorers.

A Claim In the Hills by James Wickenden

An excerpt from a book about diamond prospecting, mining and life among the Indians on the borders of Venezuela, Brazil and Guiana.

CHAPTER THREE  Village Days

In the next two days work started again in the clearing for my camp. All the seedlings and weeds were heaped and burned and then they were ready to tackle the big trees. They looked for the trees with most creepers, which are usually entangled with many of their neighbours. This scouting took some time, so that by the end of it the men had a clear idea of how the vines led from one tree to another. Again I began to feel impatient. Then they started cutting with their axes, but only three trees were chosen out of the whole area. These were the key trees: as they came crashing to earth their connecting vines brought all the others with them.

Then, after a day for the tangled mass of vines and trees to dry, the men started cutting the vines and small branches. They finished in half a day, leaving only the bare trunks of the big trees on the site, cleared for a fire to race through them. They put iowa gum here and there and lit a big fire; when it was well alight they ran about with firebrands lighting the gum, looking for split trees and thrusting fire into the gaps. The trees eventually took hold like coal and burned with great heat for two days, leaving only a few charred hunks which were removed, after cooling in the night mist, by a party with pole levers.

I made a small model with twigs and leaves to show them that I wanted my house to have a floor. They could not understand this and shook their heads. Eventually they grasped that I did not want anything complicated: round poles laid close together, I said, would do. They set to work collecting materials. I noticed that no measurements had been taken whatever, but despite this all the poles were cut to size in the jungle by the individual axemen. Then they called me into the jungle and I found them standing over a great tree they had felled, which they were beating up and down its length with the backs of their axes.

"What you making?" I asked in my halting Patamona.

"Take skin from tree and make house," they said. This was to be the floor. They slit round the trunk and the bark came off in large strips, which they carted off to the house. The women were fixing the rafters and I saw that none of the poles was either too short or too long: although the dimensions were strange, their judgement by eye had been as exact as if they had used rulers, set squares and plumb lines. I wondered if civilised man does not make too much of a fetish of his instruments.

I felt it was useless for me to give any more instructions, so I left them to it. The work speeded up. By the time the bark started coming in, the women had the base ready, so that it could be laid while it was still moist and flexible: if left to dry it would have cracked. On top of the ends of the bark strips they lashed thin laths of wood, so that the floor, although humped in places, was springy to the feet like a bed, quite strong and without creaks.

The thatching had to come from a particular lily found only in the mountains, so as a temporary measure I threw my tarpaulins over the frame, while a party went out. As the leaves came in the thatchers started from the ridgepole and worked downwards. So within a week my sixteen-foot-square house was complete in its spotless clearing on the top of the hill. It seemed to me to be a good start among the Patamona. As a special treat I handed out flour and they invented a new recipe and made it into a soup, despite my explanation that flour was for making bread. I had mixed the flour in water and they had tasted the mixture in its raw state, which, being salty, they liked, and so they just boiled this until starchy. Eventually I took a liking to it, although I found that the addition of a little sugar was an improvement.

In the following twelve days all my supplies came in and I felt that I should start at once on serious prospecting. The whole project depended on the length of time that I could last on my supplies and, having been so long with the Macoushi, they were depleted. I estimated that, taking into account the feeding of the Indians, I had only another eight weeks' stock left. Then I considered my equipment and the task. I knew that I could not tap the deep diamond-bearing gravel, as the dry season had not started: when the sand covering the deep gravel is damp there is a great danger of the walls of the shafts caving in, despite shoring. I was right in the deep gravel region, in the upper stretches of the main creeks; lower down, where the creeks slope more gently, the gravel spreads out to no more than a foot or a few inches thick. But higher up also, in the small tributaries, the gravel is shallow. So to the small tributaries I would go.

I had learnt that the Brazilian method of sieving was the quickest, and I had chosen my equipment for it. This consisted of some rolls of fine mesh of different gauges and some plywood sheets as well as shovels, spades, hoes and mattocks. During the next two days, with the help of the Indians, I made the sieves. In the Brazilian method there are three of them, saucer-shaped and so made as to fit inside each other with a gap of an inch between each, with the finest at the bottom. At the creek bank the gravel is dug out and thrown into the top sieve, which is half submerged. With a pumping action the water forces through mesh and sends the finer stuff through to the next sieve. After a quick look for big stones the upper sieve is whipped out and emptied. The second sieve is then tried; so on down the creek. Nothing could be simpler: the whole kit could be strapped on the back. It was the favoured method of the old Brazilian prospectors, the pork-knockers.

Fifty years ago was the heyday of the pork-knockers. They took with them a sack of pickled pork to last a year, and they went in "knocking" the gravel here and there on the outskirts of the jungle. Consequently they did not meet the Indians in the hinterland who were feared as strange and savage peoples. The privations of the jungle were enough to kill off many a pork-knocker, without the hostility of the Indians. As a result of this surface scratching, there are still great virgin strands of diamond-bearing gravel. The companies work the rivers, but good land also lies in Indian country, far from transport and civilisation, which distance alone keeps almost impregnable. I hoped that I might succeed where others had failed because of my good relations with the Indians and by use of the simple pork-knocking method.

In the evening, after making the sieves, I explained that I wanted them to take me to the small creeks. Next morning the children were up early as usual, out in the jungle fringe with their blowpipes to shoot early feeding birds, especially the Barbary doves, canaries and the corn birds, which feed mostly in the sand. It was chilly as seven of us collected for the expedition. The men did not take their weapons, carrying instead the shovels and sieves, but I took my gun, a habit I kept, as I did not have the Indian skill for improvising quick defence. If an Indian is alone and far from camp and finds himself near some large, dangerous animal he will first trace its tracks. If they lead straight across country all is well and he leaves it alone, but if the tracks circle about, indicating that it is in a feeding area, he may make a trap out of vines.

We walked through high jungle over ironstone boulders and stones. This rocky ground forced the trees to send out great roots along the surface, some of them in the upright spine form. The vine entanglements were vile, but unfortunately it was not safe to cut them as the trees there depended greatly on them for support. We had to burrow through the undergrowth for about three hours before reaching a sandy stretch. Here the men halted.

I was not sure of the ground as I could see no water and no defined course in the sand. "We away from the creeks," I said to Labba. "No," he said, pointing at lilies growing in the sand. "Water comes this way." Then I noticed that no tree was standing where the lilies meandered in a belt through the jungle, like a road of green through an avenue, and I realised that there must have been a watercourse here and that the damp sand below ground watered the lilies.

I decided to cover as much of these waterless creeks in the first day as possible, and started to dig a small, foot-square test-pit. The Indians watched me and I explained that everyone must set to work digging such pits all over the sand to find gravel. Then I sent off two men to find the creek sources. They were away for two hours by which time I and the remaining men had dug forty or fifty holes up and down the sand belt without once striking gravel: the sand went down either to boulders or clay. I was beginning to lose interest in the area when the two men came walking slowly back. They smiled when they saw me and swept their hands from side to side over the ground saying provocatively: "Gravelly bra. Gravelly bra!" They had no need to tell me that I could not find gravel where I stood. I wondered how they knew of our failure. They pointed to the east: the gravel ran that way, they said. The others were amused, but I stood among the rash of tiny pits, sweating and annoyed. How could they know where gravel lay? They had taken no tools for testing. In fact they had only become acquainted with the whole business two hours previously.

However, I followed them. None volunteered information. We walked up the lily belt for about a mile and then branched off through the jungle and over a sandy hillock. There was another belt of lilies below. "How do you know there is gravel here?" I asked. Without replying, one of them cut a thin flexible wand about eight feet long from a hardwood tree, with a fork at the head and the base tapered to a sharp point. He took the rod and struck it in the sand and began to plunge it up and down. In a few seconds he had punched it down into the sand until it could go no further. Then he continued to plunge the wand gently for some seconds. On withdrawing the point he ran his finger along it and showed me scars on the end caused by gravel. My shovels were, henceforth, so much ironmongery to be carried as far as testing was concerned. By the wand method a whole day's shovel-testing could be done in an hour it was possible to outline the drift of the gravel below and also to register the depth. Mining pits could be planned beforehand.

We spread out and began sounding, each man with his wand. Every time a man struck he called softly, "Gravelly! Gravelly!" The sun was going down and there was no time that day to dig any mining pits, but all of us tramped happily home knowing at least that we had found gravel conveniently close to the village. Next day the men began to clear large pits on the best spots marked the day before. During the next two weeks they opened several pits. Most were gravel with strong traces of carbon and mica, which I took as signs of diamond gravel. The Indians agreed and called the traces "diamond yapungs - diamond friends." They have considerable knowledge of stones and minerals, knowing in what type of country they will be found. Although we worked hard and kept finding mineral traces we found no diamonds, but I did not give up as all the indications showed that this must be diamond country. But my supplies were running out all the time and I decided that somehow they must be spun out further. Why not a farm of my own? It could be on the Indian pattern and instead of the eternal cassava I would grow a variety of vegetables.

The men came round to my hut in the evening as usual to squat and listen to what I had in mind. I knew by this time that such an attentive circle might indicate politeness but not necessarily co-operation. To induce them to follow a plan I usually made a large stack of flour pancakes, fried till brown. Their weakness for flour was so great that it never seemed to fail, and when their bellies were filled they could be talked into enthusiastic work. So that evening I handed out the pancakes lavishly and they sat munching for an hour in the flicker of my fire, nodding as I talked. My plan was for one party to continue prospecting while I directed another at the farm. At first they were not pleased with the idea of planting strange vegetables, so to start them off I suggested that the first area burnt would be planted with cassava. They were used to cassava and I hoped that once started they would go on with other roots. They agreed, but first we had to find suitable land.

A jungle farm has to be near a creek, sloping gently to prevent flooding in the heavy rains. The ideal is moist, well-drained soil. Near the village the best ground had already been taken so another expedition was arranged to find a farming patch.

Parties went out for the next three days, taking their weapons and hunting as they went. While returning one day, a party found a good spot about four miles from the village on a sand spur jutting from the mountains. They also brought back plenty of fresh meat from eight labbas they had killed. I persuaded them not to barbecue the carcasses, but instead to have them quartered, salted and smoked. After being cured they were hung in the roof of my house where I could keep an eye on them to prevent an orgy of eating and the need to go hunting again soon. I hoped this would ensure steady work on the farm.

When the men had gone to make a temporary camp by my farm site I wandered into the village and saw one of the girls, Amelia, the name of a mountain, beating a lily-like leaf. She was taking great care and continued beating the leaf with a small round stone, without looking up.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"What you making?"

"Lines for fishing."

"How do you do it?"

"Wait and see," she said.

After a few minutes the leaf, which was of the hemp plant, was bruised and limp. Patiently she began picking the green flesh away from the veins with her little finger and nail. Then with a practised movement she used her fingers as a rake to clear the smaller veins and waste away from the main strands. She removed each main strand with meticulous care so that it remained whole; bundled the strands and squatted; lifted a thigh and laid all the strands across it. Taking a few at a time she spun them together, controlling their outer ends in the palm of her other hand. She handed me some.

"You try," she said.

I took the strands and began working them on one of my legs. Immediately the strands caught up in the hairs of my thigh and tore them out. I now saw a further reason for the Indians shaving any hair, of which they have little, from every part of their bodies except their heads. The usual explanation is that it prevents jungle ticks from easily alighting on them. She stopped rolling and laughed helplessly. Then she continued until a long thin line came from her hand. When the line began to bind together she slipped into the ends some more veins from the bundle, and in this way the line gradually lengthened until it was twenty yards long.

"Show me the other things you use for fishing."

Her face froze and she looked at the ground. She would have to take me to the creek to show me the fish traps and to an Indian girl that could only mean an improper rendezvous. No Indian girl can allow a man to make any suggestion to her which involves following him out of the village and I had to give her something in atonement. I slipped away and came back with a piece of red ribbon. I pointed to two or three little children playing and said they should come too.

She melted, smiled and picked up some of her lines. We walked down to the creek where she signalled to me to get into a curee-ole before her.

"No," I said, "I will steer so you must get in first."

Again she froze and stood where she was, gabbling insulting remarks. I got in at once and she followed. Putting one leg in the canoe she put her other foot to a tree root and pushed the canoe half across the creek. She took out her lines as the canoe drifted lazily, and tied it to a short rod no more than three feet long. Having baited the hook she did not cast the bait into the river and wait but switched the worm into the water and as soon as it began to settle below the surface swung it out and across to the other side. So she allowed the canoe to drift as she switched the worm from side to side, and almost immediately she began pulling in small fish. Nine were caught on the first worm before it was frayed out. Passing a small creek she stopped and pointed.

"There we put traps in the high water."

Indians use traps mainly in the rains. The flood waters encourage swarms of smaller fish to swim in the slacker water of the flooded land where they find grubs and worms. The lines are used chiefly in the dry season and for the larger fish. In the mountains few fish exceed more than eight inches in length: for the larger fish the Indians must descend to the rivers in the lower jungle. One fish from the big rivers, the warak, is particularly prized. It is large and tasty, but has more than appetising value.

The ritual of giving a feast among the Indians depends on enticement. They know their own nature and realise that if a distant village is invited to come for a feast they may dally on the way: if the guests should run across a herd of wild hog on the trip they will forget about the party and hunt the hogs. So food is put out on the hilltops along the trails to tempt the guests onward. When they finally reach the host village they are met by a party waving sticks at them on which are impaled the warak.

The warak have been taken whole and smoked till hard, then stuck on sticks at different angles, forming a row. The host villagers come down at the approach of their guests and strike them lightly with these fish-covered sticks and the guests try to snatch the fish. This lively presentation of titbits is the finest enticement of all, besides showing that the hosts have gone to the trouble of travelling many days to the rivers to ensure a feast worthy of their name.

"Before the river is high," went on Amelia, "we make basket across the little creeks." These barriers are made from the lily leaves woven in the form of a long fence right across the stream, supported by vertical poles in the streambed. When the water is high the fish swim over the fence. The villagers throw many worms and grubs into the upper reaches, encouraging more fish to follow. After the first rush of the rains the water drains off the parched land quickly. As the water drops almost to the level of the barrier, the villagers jump in the stream, form a line across it and chase the fish farther upstream into the shallows. Here, with hand-nets on poles they scoop the fish into their fish baskets strapped at their waists. The children wait on the bank, calling anxiously for permission to enter the rapidly drying pool, so that they can dig out the fish which have escaped the netting and have burrowed into the mud.

Amelia did not like to say more, for like most Indian women she felt at ease only in the presence of others of her sex and age. She pointed to the way back and said shortly, "Banabu - house." We started paddling back upstream. She pointed to the bank.

"Big fishes catch with other trap."

"Anaik - how?" I asked.

Every time I spoke in Patamona she smiled. She began speaking rapidly about the other traps but it was difficult for her to explain the technical Patamona words and she gestured. I was puzzled. Impatiently she rolled out of the canoe into the cold water and swam along with one hand directing the canoe to the bank. She clambered out through the mud, turning to face me lest her brief bead apron lift over her rump. Indian women frequently emerge from the water in this way. I held a branch to steady the canoe. At the top she turned and broke off a few sticks and slid back into the water.

"Mazenga, Mazenga - watch."

She took the longest stick, which had a hooked end and stuck it in the water. The second she stuck in the bank and forced down so that it lay sprung underneath the fork, tied a piece of string to its end and repeated "Canouit canega" several times. I remembered that "canouit" meant a hook and I nodded. She explained that the hook had to be just below the surface of the water when set. The big fishes feed in the inlets on moonless nights. Amelia left the trap set and began to giggle.

"I show you how fish come to the trap."

She swam off about ten feet and sank to her eyes, taking a good look at the trap. Then she submerged, to reappear at the trap and snatch the line. The rod came out of the hooked end of the upright stick and sprang up snapping her arm to its full extent. She dismantled the trap and we paddled back with the children who had been silent and watchful throughout the demonstration.

The others were standing at the edge and Amelia got out with the same backward scuttling method as before. As usual, the others began to ask (amid laughter), what had been happening. I walked up to my camp and Labba's mother pointed to me.

"You kapung. You kapung." She meant that it seemed that I wanted to be an Indian. "Yuwalaknung - I don't know," I said. I went to my camp and was making some coffee from local beans. When its strong aroma had arisen, I heard feet shuffling in the sand outside. I smelt the villagers and waited. Labba's mother came in and looked in surprise at the black concoction in the pot. She pointed and asked what it was. I told her, "Coffee." I had to repeat the word several times, and showed the grains. It seemed that the bean, which has made Brazil famous, was unknown to them: if they had seen it in the jungle growing wild they had not made use of it. Eventually she coined in her tongue the word cappee.

She drew back and said sadly, "Yapung, poison." I remembered that the extraction they use for stunning fish in the rivers has the same strong smell as stewing coffee. To convince her I drank some. The crowd had entered. Their mouths hung open and their widely splayed toes turned up in silent anguish. I offered them some. They began wiping their mouths and spitting around saying repeatedly, "No good. No good." They pointed to the cassili shed, "Kapung cappee good," and spat again. To them their early morning drink of cold cassili was better than this. They stood waiting. They never left without receiving a gift although they would not ask for it, so I turned them out some of the favourite fried flour cakes.

This kind of incident, broken by the giggling of the women and the squeak of the hammock ropes, was the normal domestic atmosphere in the village during this time. At night there was no sound except the short bursts of crying from the children and a sigh as someone blew up a fire through a hollow bamboo pipe inserted in the embers as a bellows. The children rarely cried or felt anxious for affection or food as they slept with their mothers and the first complaint was stifled at the breast.

The men returned from my farm patch saying the large trees had been felled and they needed some extra help to start the burning. So I and a large party set out next day. Another children's game was to help in this task. A main fire was started outside the farm site and then each person picked up burning brands to light the area from the centre. The children were allowed to circle the patch lighting their own small blazes. Each person called to the next to say that he had set his piece alight and that he was on the way out. While the fire burned that day and night, the women collected cassava cuttings and banana sucker buds to plant. Before Indians begin planting the hunters go through the ashes looking for animal tracks: the deer in particular is attracted to freshly burnt ashes. This time the hunters reported many deer tracks; Labba's father reckoned they were coming in from the thicker mountain jungle and he pointed out the direction. He showed me the marks and told me that they would plant the corn seed where the tracks entered the clearing. Behind it they would plant the cassavas.

They have no regular method of planting except that they choose the deepest ash, especially the burnt tree trunks. The women formed a line and took cassava cuttings from their warishis, crouched with their knives in their right hands and dug a small hole into which they pushed the cutting almost level with the soil, never upright. They went steadily forward planting, directed by the men, who by custom never plant. The man is the hunter and the planner; the woman is the camp follower and toiler.

When the planting was complete the women went back to the village and the men stayed on to make the wabinis from which to shoot the big game attracted by the sowing. These are eight-foot-high tripods placed over the animal tracks without breaking a stick or disturbing a leaf. Around the top of the tripod is wound a huge mass of chinak ropes until it forms a seat: on this the hunter sits. About twenty wabinis were erected around the farm. Occasionally the deer are intelligent enough to leave no tracks on the edge of newly burnt ground: I have seen them jump a clear eight feet from the jungle fringe into the farm. When this happens, the hunters set wabinis inside the crop area.

In the first few nights the men did not expect much game as the shoots had not grown and the only attraction was the ash. The greatest effort to stop game is made when the buds first shoot. Three nights after the wabinis were set up, I squatted in my own wabini hoping for a shot. All the hunters had to be in position before sundown, to ensure that any human smell on the ground would be blown away before dark. Two of the men had aragebuza guns and I had my 20-bore repeater; the rest had their bows. Altogether eight of us were in position each night.

As twilight drew on, the skill most required was to hear well and to understand the least crackling of twigs. Not even the rustle of my clothes as I reached for a mosquito at my neck could be tolerated, and I sat in excruciating discomfort as the insects tingled and sucked my blood. All was silent. In the last faintness of dusk I saw the neighbouring hunter gesture slightly with his hand. Something was near me but I could hear and see nothing. The hunter on my other side made no move. Then flame leapt in a long tongue from the next wabini, followed by the crash of an aragebuza. A piece of burning wad fell through the dark like a firefly. A scrabbling shuffle through the sand showed where something was making its dying steps. No one moved. Silence. We sat the night through and that was the only kill, a small labba. I was disgraced in the morning when they showed me how its tracks had passed within a few feet of my hide.

Another night, when the shoots were bursting in the farm behind, the moon was up till nine: the hour of the deer. Just after nine all of us could hear breaking twigs two hundred yards off in the jungle. It sounded intermittently at five-minute intervals. I felt the others tensing and I pointed to the sound. The next hunter thought the animal was too far off to hear and nodded saying, "Sali - deer." He turned around and began telling the others in phonetic whistling. We kept still for an hour. Deer are slow to approach feeding grounds. I could hear whiffs of breathing. I turned to the next man; he held up his hand for silence and whispered, "Piccani - a young one." Somehow he knew the deer had an offspring with it. Gradually the animals approached the wabini second from my left. I could hear them distinctly now, coming out of the jungle to the edge of the sand. The deer stood for another hour before moving in to feed: she must have smelt some slight human scent.

I could see one of the men slowly raise his legs which hung from his seat and hook them round his wabini poles. He was one of the long-bowmen. He had already fixed the arrow and drawn his bow to one side, half behind his back. I listened intently but could hear nothing, and bent and looked under the branches to watch him more clearly. He moved the bow to the front of his body with very slow, smooth movements, and aimed below him; stretched his bow and kept it full out for several minutes, raising his aim. The deer shuffled in the sand and the hunter's aim followed him like a tracking camera. Making his final pull, he fired and the arrow breezed off.

Crashing and tumbling, the deer headed straight into the farm and the young one cried. Silence again and the faint hoarseness of the death rattle. Some of the men had vanished from their wabinis. Two more bow shots whirred. The deer made a final dash farther into the farm. Again, no sound for several minutes. The men appeared and everyone dismounted from his perch. We formed up and closed in to catch the young one. It stood over the hind legs of its mother. One of the men put down his bow and crept slowly towards it. He dived and clutched its legs. It is unsafe to grab even a young deer round the body; its hooves are as sharp as knives. The bellowing little deer had its legs tied and the men carried it out of the farm. The mother was dragged to the creek nearby, its legs tied together and lowered by them to the stream bed. The meat would be safe till morning, and no smell would attract the deer tigers. In the chill dawn mist we lit a fire and sat round eating hard cassava bread until daybreak.

The mother deer was carried slung on a pole back to a smiling reception at the village. The children crowded round the mother lying on the ground and spoke to it in mock anger, slapping it gently. "No good. No good. You destroy our farm." The elders examined the corpse to see its age and how tender its meat was and slipped the doors of the huts down to the ground as meat cutting boards. I told them that I should like the mother's skin, but Labba asked me for the white scut as a plaything for the children. They would cure it, Labba said, and string it to a long string to hang at a child's back during a dance. The fathers collected such momentos and some children sported several this way at feasts.

Meanwhile the baby was being stroked under the ears by the children, who were picking out the ticks from its hide. The skinning of its mother took place out of its sight. I took the skin back to my camp to nail it out, scrape, off the fat and wipe it with paraffin. Then some of the boys came and laughed at my preparations.

"What's wrong this time?" I asked.

"Wait," said one and ran off. He returned with a long slender rod from the yari-yari tree, a thin flexible plant used for fishing rods. The boys spread the skin on the ground and bent the wand around it, tying its ends together; when the skin was attached they released the binding on the rod ends and it sprang out stretching the skin. They said that by this means it could be put out in the sun and carried inside when it rained, but if I nailed it to the walls outside, the alternate sun and rain would spoil it. They spread on it ashes instead of paraffin and left it to cure. The Indians seldom cure any skins except that of the tiger, which makes fine hunting bags.

For the baby deer the girls went out to find tender seeds and nuts, but it did not eat for more than a day. They went on crushing the food and putting it out and, although they explained that it was usual for young captured animals to refuse food, they were anxious. I gave the girls some evaporated milk in a pan. They looked and agreed that it was like milk. I showed the tin but they would not believe that milk comes out of tins. I tried to explain that milk was taken in the big cities and dried. They saw the cow on the label, but it was no good. When they take milk from an animal it spoils in two or three days and this meant my "milk" could not have lasted. They summed it up by saying it was milik walaie - near to milk. Scientifically, of course, they were right.

I gave up the argument and tried to feed the little animal. I took a piece of cotton and soaked it in the milk and squeezed it into the deer's mouth. He began to drink it and the children took over and sat around feeding him all day. During the night his bonds were loosened and he was brought into a hut to the warmth of the fire. Next day Labba's mother told me that the baby had not slept all night. She laughed and said it had probably smelt its mother cooking in the pot next to it. This produced fits of giggles and struck me as a typical Indian joke: their sense of humour is nearly always concerned with animals. They will lie for hours on a creek bank dangling food on the surface, watching the antics of fish rising to it. They might note the way a fish arches its back to swallow, and laugh. That evening, hours after, the story will be repeated - "Did you see how the fish arched its back to swallow" - and the laughter will bubble again.

Labba's mother began chewing the nuts laid out for the deer. I asked her why. She lowered her head and fixed her eyes on me with a grunt as if I had been rude. She bent her head and her hair dropped like a veil, while she spat in her hand a pasty ball of chewed nut and popped it in through the side of the baby's mouth. It ate the paste and she prepared more. This went on for hours until she thought the deer satisfied. This pleased me as my milk was saved. For four days the deer remained in her care and it appeared as if she were the foster mother. The children were annoyed, for all wanted a share in ownership, but Labba's two younger sisters were naturally pleased at their mother's success. The other children began screaming and shouting when it was decided, that the deer would stay with Labba's family.

All over the village mothers were thumping their off-spring on the back of the head or pulling their ears to quiet them: the usual chastisement. The mothers then took their children to their fathers resting in hammocks. It was explained that their children could no longer play with the deer as it had become the property of the Labbas. The fathers turned and looked at the wall. Still the soft, persistent campaign continued. A father would eventually jump up in exasperation. "All right," he would say, "come with me." Half amused, he was nevertheless on his mettle to find his child something to tame. The men saw the joke of it.

The father left the camp, asking through a doorway if the man of the house was coming too. With a sigh the other rose and took his weapons from behind the door. We were off pet hunting. We went to the tall jungle where the parakeet and the macaw live. Every tree passed was examined for nests. We looked in the sand also for the blue maam, which lays in the sand, and makes a good pet, but we found only its royal blue eggs. We came across a small flight of waracobra -one of the fastest birds on its feet, which seldom flies. They had chicks and we chased after them with the children yelling and caught three. This would have done except that one man had promised his son a parakeet. The waracobra chicks were put in a basket and we went on up the mountain spurs, looking in many nests, all of which had only eggs.

We decided to go into the macaw country, the lighter jungle on dry sand where the old trees wither from lack of moisture. The sun struck through the dried, broken branches of the ancient jungle giants and the whole area had a blasted, forlorn look. Most of the tree trunks were punctured by holes where the macaw nested. We threw stones to arouse them. One or two macaws flew out and we could see the young ones stretching their necks from the holes, but they were twenty or thirty feet up the smooth bole.

A man cut some chinak creeper four feet long and tied the ends with a reef knot round the tree and by lifting the rope with his toes gave himself a foothold as he pulled up with his hands. He looked in all the holes, turning himself round on the trunk. He plucked out a chick and came down with its wing held in his lips. He went up again for another and the children were wreathed in smiles, holding their birds close, comparing them and boasting of size and markings on their own. Then we returned to the village now in the grip of a pet craze. Indians usually have one or two pets and are adept at both catching and taming almost any creature, although birds are the favourites. They never cage their pets and give them complete freedom.

The taming is done by the elder girls. They cuddle the bird for hours, stroking it gently and lifting its beak. They never feed it on raw food: food is first half-chewed by the girls and the bird is fed from the girl's mouth. Eventually the bird is taken off its own diet and is made to eat the Indian food of cassava and in effect the Indians replace the mother bird. The chick develops trust and adopts the Indian diet so that it soon no longer desires to return to the jungle, where now it could not easily survive.

Once in this village they were taming an acouri, a creature the size of a rabbit with the same face and hopping gait, but with small pointed ears and golden fur. For many days they fed it on nuts and then cassava bread until it was quite tame. They made a home for it in the camp. It had to be a hollow gourd, as a hole is the acouri's natural lair. One day it ran off and the whole village turned out to search for it. Two days later it came back on its own, and scuttled into the gourd and stayed there in a shivering state of fright. The villagers called it softly but did not touch it. Eventually it came to the entrance and they picked it up. It was bitten and torn and thin. The villagers explained that it had gone back to its own kind who, scenting the human smell it carried, had set upon it. The same thing happened to a powice, which had been tamed. It returned with beak marks round its head, which the Indians easily identified as marks of other powice. This often happens to a tamed animal returning to the wild.

They once tamed a wild pig until it was full-grown, which I named Bingo. It developed the habits of a tame dog, standing on its hind legs to them and grunting in the way a dog barks greeting. When it was called by name it would stop its perambulations of the village and snap its teeth together so loudly that the sound could be heard half-a-mile away. It followed me everywhere, walking alongside like the best-trained gun dog. In fact the tamed wild pig is better for a jungle hunter, for wild pigs are ferocious enemies of snakes, and their thick blubbery hide, in which there are few blood vessels, protects then from snake-bite. Their horny snouts and great tusks are formidable weapons against anything on the ground. For this reason the Indians prize tamed pig, especially around their children.

One pet the Indians never have: monkeys. Although they recognise the monkeys as the most sensible of the jungle creatures, once they are tamed and have overcome their shyness they become extremely destructive.

If you enjoyed reading this excerpt from A Claim in the Hills you can purchase the complete book in digital PDF format for only $12.95 US

Click here to order A Claim in the Hills for $12.95 US

Click here to read a full description of the book