Before leaving we prepared for shipment back to the museum some of the bigger skins, and also some of the weapons and utensils of the Indians, which Kermit had collected.  These included woven fillets, and fillets made of macaw feathers, for use in the dances; woven belts; a gourd in which the sacred drink is offered to the god Enoerey; wickerwork baskets; flutes or pipes; anklet rattles; hammocks; a belt of the kind used by the women in carrying the babies, with the weaving-frame.  All these were Parecis articles.  He also secured from the Nhambiquaras wickerwork baskets of a different type and bows and arrows.  The bows were seven feet long and the arrows five feet.  There were blunt-headed arrows for birds, arrows with long, sharp wooden blades for tapir, deer, and other mammals; and the poisoned war-arrows, with sharp barbs, poison-coated and bound on by fine thongs, and with a long, hollow wooden guard to slip over the entire point and protect it until the time came to use it.  When people talk glibly of “idle” savages they ignore the immense labor entailed by many of their industries, and the really extraordinary amount of work they accomplish by the skilful use of their primitive and ineffective tools.

It was not until early in the afternoon that we started into the “sertao,"[*] as Brazilians call the wilderness.  We drove with us a herd of oxen for food.  After going about fifteen miles we camped beside the swampy headwaters of a little brook.  It was at the spot where nearly seven years previously Rondon and Lyra had camped on the trip when they discovered Utiarity Falls and penetrated to the Juruena.  When they reached this place they had been thirty-six hours without food.  They killed a bush deer—­a small deer—­and ate literally every particle.  The dogs devoured the entire skin.  For much of the time on this trip they lived on wild fruit, and the two dogs that remained alive would wait eagerly under the trees and eat the fruit that was shaken down.

[*] Pronounced “sairtown,” as nearly as, with our preposterous methods
    of spelling and pronunciation, I can render it.

In the late afternoon the piums were rather bad at this camp, but we had gloves and head-nets, and were not bothered; and although there were some mosquitoes we slept well under our mosquito-nets.  The frogs in the swamp uttered a peculiar, loud shout.  Miller told of a little tree-frog in Colombia which swelled itself out with air until it looked like the frog in Aesop’s fables, and then brayed like a mule; and Cherrie told of a huge frog in Guiana that uttered a short, loud roar.