Back of Beyond by David Yeadon Read Free Book Online Page A

the heat rose by the minute. But it was a pleasant interlude, and I treasured its memory all through the grinding day.
     
     
    Tin didn’t seem to want to talk about the Pémon Indians’ poison darts, blown from bamboo blowguns at speeds of up to 120 mph and amazingly accurate, even for the novice. He carried two guns with him and half a dozen arrows stuck in each tube. Each arrow was tapered to a needle-sharp point; the other end was encased in a cottonlike wad that protruded slightly from the blowing end, a sort of primitive packing, not too loose, not too tight, which acted as a flight pad for the blower’s blast and kept the arrow centered down the bore of the tube. The outer casing of each blowgun was decorated in brown dye patterns and tightly woven bamboo strips. One looked like an ancient instrument, chipped, scratched, and darkened with years of use. “B’long father,” Tin explained.
    In a pouch he carried, a small leather calabash dark blue in color, was a thick gooey ball of curare paste. Instantly lethal to animal and human alike, it is produced in conditions of great secrecy from the pounded and roasted stems of two specific jungle creepers. All Tin would tell me was that his father made one of the most potent concoctions in the upper Orinoco region, and people from other tribes would travel great distances between the tepuis to barter for his tiny leather pouches. The weaker varieties merely disoriented the prey, leaving it vulnerable to clubs and knives for a few minutes. Tin’s left nothing to chance.
    We were by a stream one night. He had developed a liking for my Venezuelan cigars and took delight in sucking the pungent smoke deep into his lungs while I merely puffed and dispelled it like a first-time indulgee. It was cool (anything below eighty degrees in that jungle would justify that adjective), and the air was strangely still. Nothing moved; leaves of every size and shape drooped over the chuckling water—big rhubarby ferns, elephant ears, fat succulents, thin mean spindly leaves like stilettos, vivid purple explosions of shamrock-shaped leaves, high palms, and dense ground-clutching clusters of olive-green shoots. A melting pot of leafy variants, each one perfect in itself…but that’s another long diversion.
    Tin nudged me and pointed with his head to a large black bird with a huge multicolored beak. A macaw! We heard them all the time and often saw them high against the sky like gliders. I never realized they were so big close up. With slow flowing movements Tin pulled the blowpipe from his waist belt and slid one of the curare-tipped arrows into the tube. At first I didn’t realize what he was doing until the tube was at his mouth. The bird was motionless, unaware of our presence. He was going to kill it.
    “Tin. No!”
    He paused and looked at me.
    I shook my head again. “No. Please don’t.”
    On a couple of occasions I’ve been at the firing end of rifles and know the power you feel at that moment before squeezing the trigger. But this seemed too easy, too unnecessary. We didn’t need meat; we were doing fine on fruit and the staples carried with us. Grilled macaw just didn’t appeal anyway. Keeping the pipe at his lips, he picked a pebble from the earth and threw it at the stream. It splashed about two feet from the macaw, which turned, extended its wings, and flung itself frantically into the air.
    Almost simultaneously, a huge brown frog that had been sitting on a rock not far from the macaw croaked in alarm and leaped for the stream.
    A quick rush of air. The arrow sped out of the pipe like a silver bullet and, impaled in midleap, the frog turned gracefully and landed with a flatulent sound in the shallows. It never moved again. The stream eased past, shaking the arrow’s cotton top. The frog must have died instantly, not just from the curare but from the amazing accuracy of the shot.
    Tin turned to me and smiled. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. Much later that night