EQUATORIAL FOREST DWELLERS. 99 



extensive woods, and steer a straight course from one 

 point to another with unerring skill, through a great 

 forest country, in any direction, whether the route had 

 ever been traversed by them before or not. Never- 

 theless in these days at all events, this faculty is con- 

 fined almost entirely to the forest Indians, of which 

 the Mic-Mac tribe of New Brunswick may be cited 

 as a good example ; these men therefore make the best 

 possible guides to sportsmen throughout that province. 



In the great equatorial forests such tribes are still 

 very numerous, and in the almost boundless expanse 

 of the African and the Brazilian thickets, there are 

 doubtless many native tribes who still believe that 

 the whole world is one vast forest, and in whose minds 

 the idea of a treeless plain could hardly be realized. 

 We know that this is so also in Africa, where whole 

 nations of forest people, according to Mr. H. M. Stanley, 

 exist in the upper waters of the Congo system, who 

 have never seen, or even heard of a grassy plain. * 

 These forests, as we have not failed to point out in our 

 chapter upon the Equatorial Zone, are almost every- 

 where of the densest possible character, so bound 

 together by lianas and creepers of various kinds that 

 a man has to make constant use of the hatchet or 

 slashing hook to make his way along at all and in 

 such countries where white men have settlements, as 

 for instance in Brazil or Central America, the settler 

 never moves about without a weapon of this kind, as 

 part of his personal equipment a "machete," as it is 

 called in Spanish. 



* See Official Report of Dec. 28, 1889, on the results of his expe- 

 dition, by H. M. Stanley, published in the London Times of Feb. 

 1 8th, 1890. 



