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Cornugaya Directory 09
Page 09
That day we went over eleven successive hill ranges and crossed as many
little streamlets between them. My men were terribly downhearted. We had
with us a Mauser and two hundred cartridges, but although we did nothing
all day long but look for something to kill we never heard a sound of a
living animal. Only one day at the beginning of our fast did I see a big
_mutum_--larger than a big turkey. The bird had never seen a human being,
and sat placidly perched on the branch of a tree, looking at us with
curiosity, singing gaily. I tried to fire with the Mauser at the bird,
which was only about seven or eight metres away, but cartridge after
cartridge missed fire. I certainly spent not less than twenty minutes
constantly replenishing the magazine, and not a single cartridge went
off. They had evidently absorbed so much moisture on our many accidents
in the river and in the heavy rain-storms we had had of late, that they
had become useless.
We found that day a palm with a bunch of small nuts which Benedicto
called _coco do matto_; he said they were delicious to eat, so we
proceeded to cut down the tall palm tree. When we came to split open the
small _cocos_ our disappointment was great, for they merely contained
water. There was nothing whatever to eat inside the hard shells. We spent
some two hours that evening cracking the _cocos_--some two hundred of
them--each nut about the size of a cherry. They were extremely hard to
crack, and our expectant eyes were disappointed two hundred times in
succession as we opened every one and found nothing whatever to eat in
them.
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