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This poison, though it produces a deadly effect on all animals, as well as on the natives, who exist without salt, has very little effect on salt-consuming Europeans. Salt, indeed, is the only antidote to the poison. The hunter, therefore, when in search of the white uakari, supplies himself with a small quantity of salt.
My baggage was soon landed, and before the steamer departed I had taken gun, insect-net, and game-bag, to make a preliminary exploration of my new locality. I remained here nineteen days, and, considering the shortness of the time, made a very good collection of monkeys, birds, and insects. This conclusion is confirmed by the case of the Uakari monkeys, described in the last chapter.
They afforded us great amusement; till at last, after an hour or so, Uncle Paul, who had been sleeping, suddenly started up and gave a loud sneeze, when they all scampered up a tree; and as we looked up, we could see them making their way along the topmost branches, till they disappeared in the distance. Kallolo told us that this species of monkey is known as the white uakari.
The animals that I had rarely became familiar, however long they might remain in my possession, a circumstance due no doubt to their being kept always tied up. The Uakari is one of the many species of animals which are classified by the Brazilians as "mortal," or of delicate constitution, in contradistinction to those which are "duro," or hardy.
These red-faced apes belonged to a species called by the Indians Uakari, which is peculiar to the Ega district, and the cage with its contents was being sent as a present by Senor Chrysostomo, the Director of Indians of the Japura, to one of the Government officials at Rio Janeiro, in acknowledgment of having been made colonel of the new National Guard.
The Indians call it the white uakari. It inhabits, as far as is known, no other district. In spite of its want of tail, it is an active little creature, running up and down the larger branches, but seldom leaping from one to the other. The mothers, as is the custom with the other monkey orders, carry their young on their back.
It was so unusual to see a nearly tailless monkey from America, that naturalists thought, when the first specimens arrived in Europe, that the member had been shortened artificially. Nevertheless, the Uakari is not quite isolated from its related species of the same family, several other kinds, also found on the Amazons, forming a graduated passage between the extreme forms as regards the tail.
When I descended the river in 1859, we had with us a tame adult Uakari, which was allowed to ramble about the vessel, a large schooner.
After seeing much of the morose disposition of the Uakari, I was not a little surprised one day at a friend's house to find an extremely lively and familiar individual of this species.
A young one thus entrapped speedily becomes tame, and is much prized, as an interesting pet, by the white inhabitants. Kallolo promised, as soon as he could manufacture a blowpipe, to try and catch a young uakari for Marian; and he said that he was sure, under the instruction of Quacko, it would soon become civilised. Hitherto Quacko and the ara parrot had been our chief sources of amusement.
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