Sept. 27, 1913. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
391 
A Mulobile in the Cordilleras 
By HENRY WELLINGTON WACK, F.R.G.S. 
C OSTA RICA is the Switzerland of Central 
America. It is high and low, but neither 
long nor wide. From its Atlantic port, 
Lirnon, on the Caribbean Sea, to its port of 
Puntarenas on the Pacific, the distance is about 
145 miles. It lies just north of the Isthmus of 
Panama, where we are blowing up earth to plant 
an eternal investment of millions of money and 
tons of worry. When men become stale and 
fevered on the isthmus, they drag their palsied 
bodies to the cool - Cordillera mountains of the 
hospitable land of the Ticos, the name by which 
Costa Rica is known throughout the native life 
of Spanish America. So it is in the nature of 
events that we are bound to enlarge our already 
significant friendly and financial interest in that 
beautiful little Republic with which I am sure 
we have a secret political understanding that it 
shall be kept inviolate from its rebellious neigh¬ 
bors, and serve us as the buffer State between 
Panama and the belligerent Republics on the 
north. 
Of its people and their customs, little is 
known in the United States and Europe, for 
travel in its region for pleasure has not as yet 
become the habit of even the most whimsical 
globe trotter. But there is much to see, even 
more to feel, in this picturesque little land by 
him who loves life in the open. For it is only- 
life in the open that is necessary here where 
the climate is soft and equable on its broad 
savannas, and mild and bracing in its mountain 
plateaus. There are four dry months and eight 
very wet ones. During the dry season the dust 
rises like a mist from the powdered roads and 
trails; during the wet months the rain pours at 
the rate of three quarts to a drop every day 
at 4 o’clock. A very wet season, such as the 
one which closed last January, after washing out 
and wrecking railways and bridges, often means 
that native and traveler alike moves through 
the country on the back of a stunted little mule. 
This brings me face to face with the equine 
remains on which I recently floundered through 
the land of the Ticos. 
Ihere are two kinds of mules (mitlo) and 
ponies (caballo) in Costa Rica, land of the 
finest bananas and best coffee in all the world. 
Mules that are about to die and those which 
ought to have died a decade or two ago. Ponies 
are classified in the same manner. However, 
I once found a mule lively enough to object 
because a four penny wire nail driven through 
his disarticulated crupper had pierced the base 
of his frazzled tail. For unmitigated candor, 
this little roan mule beat any quadruped I ever 
learned to respect in all Central America. One 
ot his lungs had become impostumated from 
contact with the odoriferous mozo who rode 
him, for sanitation in a mule pradera is un¬ 
known in this region of the open gutter and 
vast freedom to spit and pollute. The other 
lung was sorely in need of a quinine tonic. Plis 
"'The Spanish word for mule is nuilo. The mules oi 
Central America are very bilious, owing to a habitual 
grouch against all forms of life, partly on account of a 
bile-producing diet of green sugar cane unvaried by 
grain or meal. Thus the ethnology of mulobile. 
case of heaves was distressing. Ilis humped and 
sensitive back had been galled since he was a 
tiny mulette thirty, aye, forty years ago. Some 
drunken, mischievous paeon had chopped his big 
ears) into slits with the machete. His little, 
gnarled hoofs, worn to the quick at the heel, 
had never known the civilized restraint of an 
iron shoe, nor its support on the sheer side of 
a c slippery clay bank. Ilis food had never in¬ 
cluded an ounce of grain. In his babyhood he 
had been turned out upon the sapless grass 
which, while it looks like substantial fodder, 
was in fact composed of ninety-eight parts 
water and two parts green fiber. In his adult 
mulage—but on working days only—his infre¬ 
quent ration consisted of green sugar cane 
chopped into two-inch lengths. The moil and 
rancid grime of years had made his shaggy 
coat rough and lustcrless and imparted to the 
neglected little fellow the stench of a pig sty. 
On this embodiment of Central American 
inhumanity, the wanderer in Latin-American 
struggles over the mountain passes and wide 
deep-rutted roads beyond the Spanish Main. Is 
it so wonderful then that a ride upon decrepit 
and shifting saddles, rope-haltered and hitless 
little mules in torrential rain's, on nights as black 
as a tunnel is a weird journey in a land where 
drunken boyeros (ox cart drivers) meet the 
wayfarer with machete and crapubous lanterns, 
fill the air with oaths, and aimlessly plunge their 
hoofed teams toward all sides of the highway 
in utter disregard of anything ahead? It is not, 
for the wilderness here begins at the edge of 
the native village and extends its impenetrable 
jungle to the next. The beaten track is the 
only way forward and the only way back. Only 
at the exhausting cost of cutting your way 
through a tangled forest of tropical vines and 
trees and moss, can you go far to the right or 
left of the open road. Characteristic, too, of all 
Central America is the road’s great width. It 
is often 300 feet wide, ungraded and without 
gutters except near the mines' of northern in¬ 
vaders, that Yankee influx without which the 
country would he a wilderness and its govern- 
MY MULO ON A ‘SOUTH STROLL.” 
Tainted for Forfst and Stream by Henry Wellington Wack. 
