The battle was over.  Soon the urubus, or vultures, were hanging over the tree-tops waiting for their share of the spoils.  The men assembled in front of the Chief for roll-call.  Four of our men were killed outright by rifle-bullets, and it was typical of these brave men that none were killed by machete stabs.  The entire marauding expedition of twenty Peruvians was completely wiped out, not a single one escaping the deadly aim of the Mangeromas.  Thus was avoided the danger of being attacked in the near future by a greater force of Peruvians, called to this place from the distant frontier by some returning survivor.

It is true that the Mangeromas lay in ambush for their enemy and killed them, for the greater part, with poisoned arrows and spears, but the odds were against the Indians, not only because the caboclos were attacking them in larger numbers, but because they came with modern, repeating fire-arms against the hand weapons of the Mangeromas.  These marauders, too, came with murder and girl-robbery in their black hearts, while the Mangeromas were defending their homes and families.  But it is true that after the battle, so bravely fought, the Indians cut off the hands and feet of their enemies, dead or dying, and carried them home.

The fight lasted only some twenty minutes, but it was after sunset when we reached the maloca.  The women and children received us with great demonstrations of joy.  Soon the pots and pans were boiling inside the great house.  I have previously observed how the Mangeromas would partake of parts of the human body as a sort of religious rite, whenever they had been successful with their man-traps; now they feasted upon the hands and feet of the slain, these parts having been distributed among the different families.

I crept into my hammock and lit my pipe, watching the great mass of naked humanity.  All the men had laid aside their feather-dresses and squirrel tails, and were moving around among the many fires on the floor of the hut.  Some were sitting in groups discussing the battle, while women bent over the pots to examine the ghastly contents.  Here, a woman was engaged in stripping the flesh from the palm of a hand and the sole of a foot, which operation finished, she threw both into a large earthen pot to boil; there, another woman was applying an herb-poultice to her husband’s wounds.

Over it all hung a thick, odoriferous smoke, gradually finding its way out through the central opening in the roof.

This was a feast, indeed, such as few white men, I believe, have witnessed.

That night and the next day, and the following four days, great quantities of chicha were drunk and much meat was consumed to celebrate the great victory, the greatest in the annals of the Mangeromas of Rio Branco.

Earthen vessels and jars were used in the cooking of food.  The red clay (Tabatinga clay) found abundantly in these regions formed a superior material for these utensils.  They were always decorated symbolically with juices of the scarlet urucu and the black genipapa.  Even when not burned into the clay, these were permanent colours.