338 Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



Caripe, a first-class waterman, cool, fearless, and brawny 

 as a bull, came with us as guide. Half a dozen times the 

 loads were taken out and carried down. At one cataract 

 the canoes were themselves dragged overland ; elsewhere 

 they were run down empty, shipping a good deal of water. 

 At the foot of the cataract, where we dragged the canoes 

 overland, we camped for the night. Here Kermit shot 

 a big cayman. Our camp was alongside the graves of 

 three men who at this point had perished in the swift 

 water. 



Senhor Caripe told us many strange adventures of 

 rubber-workers he had met or employed. One of his 

 men, working on the Gy-Parana, got lost and after 

 twenty-eight days found himself on the Madeirainha, 

 which he thus discovered. He was in excellent health, 

 for he had means to start a fire, and he found abundance 

 of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises. Senhor Caripe 

 said that the rubber-men now did not go above the ninth 

 degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan proper, 

 having found the rubber poor on the reaches above. A 

 year previously five rubber-men, Mundurucu Indians, 

 were working on the Canuma at about that level. It is 

 a difficult stream to ascend or descend. They made ex- 

 cursions into the forest for days at a time after caout- 

 chouc. On one such trip, after fifteen days they, to their 

 surprise, came out on the Aripuanan. They returned and 

 told their "patron" of their discovery ; and by his orders 

 took their caoutchouc overland to the Aripuanan, built a 

 canoe, and ran down with their caoutchouc to Manaos. 

 They had now returned and were working on the upper 

 Aripuanan. The Mundurucus and Brazilians are always 



