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In such places a tapir could have hidden himself from the sharpest-eyed hunters, and herein lies the chief difficulty of this kind of hunt. "It was not long before a low whistle was heard from one of the ubas, a sign for the others to come up. The traces of a tapir had been discovered. "The chief, with a stroke or two of his palm-wood paddle, brought our canoe to the spot.
Three or four ubas, and two pirogues, with the necessary rigging, were carried on board, and afforded easy communications with the banks. The pilot had to look after the channels of the river, the deviations of the current, the eddies which it was necessary to avoid, the creeks or bays which afforded favorable anchorage, and to do this he had to be in the bow.
They navigated the rivers in large canoes, called ubas, made of immense hollowed-out tree trunks; in these they used to go on war expeditions, carrying in the prows their trophies and calabash rattles, whose clatter was meant to intimidate their enemies. They were gentle in disposition, and received the early Portuguese settlers with great friendliness.
The ubas and the pirogues, dividing the work among them, limited the field of their researches to the extreme edge of the eddy, and from the circumference to the center the crews' long poles left not a single point unexplored. But no amount of sounding discovered the body of the adventurer, neither among the clumps of reeds nor on the bottom of the river, whose slope was then carefully examined.
Nothing can be more picturesque than this village with its ruddy-colored banks, its unfinished church, its cottages, whose chimneys are hidden amid the palms, and its two or three ubas half-stranded on the shore. During the whole of the 7th of June the jangada continued to follow the left bank of the river, passing several unknown tributaries of no importance.
These boats were either "ubas," canoes made from the trunk of a tree, hollowed out by fire, and finished with the ax, pointed and light in front, and heavy and broad in the stern, able to carry from one to a dozen paddlers, and of three or four tons burden: "egariteas," constructed on a larger scale, of broader design, and leaving on each side a gangway for the rowers: or "jangada," rafts of no particular shape, propelled by a triangular sail, and surmounted by a cabin of mud and straw, which served the Indian and his family for a floating home.
"Well, we were soon in the ubas, and paddling up-stream. The tuxava and I occupied a canoe to ourselves. His only arms were a light fusil, which I had given him as a present. It was a good piece, and he was proud of it. This was to be its first trial. I had a rifle for my own weapon.
It was in this difficult task that Benito and his companions were employed till the evening. The ubas and pirogues, worked by the oars, traversed the whole surface of the river up to the bar of Frias. There had been moments of excitement during this spell of work, when the harrows, catching in something at the bottom, offered some slight resistance.
The ubas, strung out in a long irregular line, sprang up-stream in obedience to the vigorous strokes of the rowers, and these sang in a sort of irregular concert as they plied their paddles. The songs were improvised: they told the feats of the hunters already performed, and promised others yet to be done.
They were of different sizes; some capable of containing half a dozen, while others were meant to carry only a single person. "In a few minutes the ubas were freighted with their living cargoes, consisting not only of the hunters, but of most of the women and boys of the malocca, with a score or two of dogs. "These dogs were curious creatures to look at.
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