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Updated: May 24, 2025
All that hot summer day, we dug and washed and watched, but with unsatisfactory results. In the long-shadowed afternoon we packed traps and set off down the valley. The egrets, camping by dozens on feeding carabao, flapped away as we approached; we found our baroto as we had left it, rising gently on the incoming tide in the shade of a clump of bamboo.
The turns and twists grew narrower, and the difficulty of steering our long baroto around these grew greater. The men got but and waded, pushing the baroto lightly over the soft ooze. But finally this failed. It was eight o'clock, the sun climbing higher and burning fiercer, when we stuck ignominiously in the mud of kut-i-kut.
It was "Hiawatha," and to the inspiring strains of "Let the women do the work, let the men take it easy," our forgotten baroto swept into sight in the easy water under the opposite bank. We made a herculean effort, inspired by envy, and got away. Space forbids me to enumerate the hairbreadth escapes of that journey. We put men ashore when the banks permitted and were towed like a canal boat.
Sometimes we met a baroto on its way to market with a cargo of three chickens, five cocoanuts, two bunches of bananas, one head of the family, four children, and several women unaccounted for. The freight was heaped at one end, and the passengers all squatted in that perfect, uncommunicative equilibrium which a Filipino can maintain for hours at a time.
As we slipped out of the shallow water at the bank, the current caught us and hurled us fifty feet down stream. The baroto left apparently for the port, which was four miles away.
We were to leave town in a baroto at three A.M. to get the benefit of the tide. At half-past nine the night before, the lunch basket containing my contribution to the commissary department was packed and suspended from the ceiling by a rope, protected by a petroleum-soaked rag, and I went to bed to dream of gold mines, country houses, yachts, and European travel.
The middle of the baroto, for a distance of about six feet, was floored and canopied. Mr. The men unslung their revolvers, and we disposed ourselves so as to secure a proper equilibrium to our tippy craft, and were off. We slipped down the river, aided by the tide, and in a few minutes were far away from the last house, the last gleam of light, and the least sound of human life.
The baggage and a few supernumerary young men and a mandolin orchestra were loaded into an enormous baroto, and ten sturdy brown backs bent forward as the boatmen pushed with all their strength against the great bamboo poles, which looked as if they would snap under the strain. The river was swollen with three days' tropical downpour and running out resistlessly in the teeth of a high tide.
The unanimity thait had so long been sought swept like an epidemic into our lumbering steeds, and our baroto started ahead with a firmness of purpose that sent the author of this book flying into the mud, and bumped us all up most gloriously as we lunged round the corner. The good work once begun was not allowed to fall slack, however.
I unhooked the lunch basket and prowled my way out of the house, seeking to disturb nobody and feeling quite adventurous. Our baroto with six native oarsmen was waiting at the stone stairway in the shadow of the bridge, and as the tide was beginning to turn we lost no time in bestowing ourselves and our provisions.
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