Part One: Hunting - an insight that we should recognize
This is the story of two societies. The first is that of the pygmy and the second of a group known as the Machaguena of Brazil. Pygmy and Machaguena societies are without hierarchy. They both live surviving from the work of everyone in the group. Hunting is not an easy venture and we will see this in the story of the Machaguena. The following text is the story of the Pygmy. Interspersed is the story of the Machaguena.
The Pygmy
The "leader," who has no actual authority, is merely a reference point for outsiders. I asked the leader of a camp if a colleague and I could go net- hunting with his group. He spoke at length with the others, clearly taking into account that we had brought plenty of food and cigarettes as gifts.
The settlement comprised nine or perhaps ten families: seven agreed that we could accompany them. A net hunt - the type normally practiced by most pygmies - requires at least seven nets to form a wide enough circle. Each family usually has just one net, about forty yards long, made out of rope taken from the bark of certain trees.
We left the following morning, and set up camp in the forest a few hours later. The women spent two or three hours building huts in the shape of an elongated sphere, long enough for a pygmy to lie down in, with an entrance so small that you have to wriggle through on your stomach. The bare outer structure of entwined branches is covered by large leaves, making it completely waterproof. The bed is made of thin trunks laid lengthwise. Two young pygmies had no wives to build their hut, so they slept on a bed of branches in the open, huddled together against the cold. My colleague and I used our camp beds with mosquito nets. In the night it rained, and we donned our raincoats and propped our beds up under a tree to prevent them from getting too wet. The rain didn't last long (it was the dry season), so we were able to go back to sleep.
The next day we set out hunting, together with the women and smaller children, who went looking for birds and turtles. The dense tropical forest, with its thirty to forty-yard-high trees, grows a leaf cover thick enough to block out the sun, leaving the forest sunk in a deep shade. The only vegetation is the occasional bush or plant, which is extremely green because of the lack of light. The ground is strewn with fallen tree trunks and roots.
INSERT MOVIE: Hunting.mov
The men lay out their yard-high nets in a rough circle, hanging them from low branches to keep them from being obvious to animals. Each man remains silent and unseen by the others until the signal is given that the circle is complete. The hunt begins: three or four pygmies move toward the center with their spears, making noises to frighten the prey; the others, including the women, stay with the nets to grab the animals, mostly gazelles and antelopes, which, when caught, try to escape. They run away very fast, which makes them hard to seize. Visibility in the thick forest is limited to a few yards, so it is rare to see these encounters; shouts and struggling noises are heard until the prey either is captured or escapes. The hunt lasts forty or fifty minutes, and then the group moves about half a mile and starts again.
We went on like this all day, without much success. Between one netting and another, the pygmies tried to change their luck with magic words, spitting on the nets, sometimes enticing the animals with songs or hurling insults at them. At one point a big animal - an antelope - was taken. We knew because in the middle of all the confusion we suddenly heard a loud laugh, clearly an expression of great joy.
The meat was divided among all the members of the village, although some of the best parts belonged by right to those who had taken the animals. For the pygmies, hunting is a job, a necessity, but also a pleasure. Like the game of poker, it entails all the uncertainties of luck but requires skill and experience. The stake is to eat or go hungry. The pygmies have developed a great understanding of animal behavior, which allows them to hunt diff~cult animals such as the anteater and large ones such as the elephant. They are completely different from other hunters of our time, who hunt as a hobby and spend hours shut up in river blinds waiting for duck, perhaps risking being shot by another hunter, but never going hungry. The pygmies love their life profoundly. To uproot them is difficult-you have to destroy the forest to do so. That is exactly what has been happening over the last two thousand years, and it continues at an astounding rate, in a kind of planetary annihilation. But as long as large untouched areas of tropical forest survive in Africa, pygmies will be hunting in it. Their proverbial skill was proved to us when we lent one a rifle and four cartridges: he returned that evening with three dead animals and one cartridge, which had misfired..
The forest is full of a thousand pleasures
and delicacies. For example, I fancied trying wild bee honey. A pygmy told
me he knew of a hive three hours' journey away (and thirty yards up a tree!).
I promised him a reward and he returned later with a dark-color honey, some
of which we mixed with whiskey.
Each spring there is a celebration of the arrival of the caterpillars. The
forest fills with the apparently very tasty butterfly caterpillar. I was
not in the area at the time. This is when the pygmies take the settled farmers
into the forest and without knowing help them store up on protein, precious
in the farmers' mostly carbohydrate diet.