for the burden-bearers, and superintended the portage of the loads.  The rocky sides of the gorge were too steep for laden men to attempt to traverse them.  Accordingly the trail had to go over the top of the mountain, both the ascent and the descent of the rock-strewn, forest-clad slopes being very steep.  It was hard work to carry loads over such a trail.  From the top of the mountain, through an opening in the trees on the edge of a cliff, there was a beautiful view of the country ahead.  All around and in front of us there were ranges of low mountains about the height of the lower ridges of the Alleghenies.  Their sides were steep and they were covered with the matted growth of the tropical forest.  Our next camping-place, at the foot of the gorge, was almost beneath us, and from thence the river ran in a straight line, flecked with white water, for about a kilometre.  Then it disappeared behind and between mountain ridges, which we supposed meant further rapids.  It was a view well worth seeing; but, beautiful although the country ahead of us was, its character was such as to promise further hardships, difficulty, and exhausting labor, and especially further delay; and delay was a serious matter to men whose food supply was beginning to run short, whose equipment was reduced to the minimum, who for a month, with the utmost toil, had made very slow progress, and who had no idea of either the distance or the difficulties of the route in front of them.

There was not much life in the woods, big or little.  Small birds were rare, although Cherrie’s unwearied efforts were rewarded from time to time by a species new to the collection.  There were tracks of tapir, deer, and agouti; and if we had taken two or three days to devote to nothing else than hunting them we might perchance have killed something; but the chance was much too uncertain, the work we were doing was too hard and wearing, and the need of pressing forward altogether too great to permit us to spend any time in such manner.  The hunting had to come in incidentally.  This type of well nigh impenetrable forest is the one in which it is most difficult to get even what little game exists therein.  A couple of curassows and a big monkey were killed by the colonel and Kermit.  On the day the monkey was brought in Lyra, Kermit, and their four associates had spent from sunrise to sunset in severe and at moments dangerous toil among the rocks and in the swift water, and the fresh meat was appreciated.  The head, feet, tail, skin, and entrails were boiled for the gaunt and ravenous dogs.  The flesh gave each of us a few mouthfuls; and how good those mouthfuls tasted!

Cherrie, in addition to being out after birds in every spare moment, helped in all emergencies.  He was a veteran in the work of the tropic wilderness.  We talked together often, and of many things, for our views of life, and of a man’s duty to his wife and children, to other men, and to women, and to the state in peace and war, were in all essentials the same.  His father had served all through the Civil War, entering an Iowa cavalry regiment as a private and coming out as a captain; his breast-bone was shattered by a blow from a musket-butt, in hand-to-hand fighting at Shiloh.