Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [188]
It went without saying that the two colonels would have to stick together, as co-commanders, with Kermit and Lyra assisting them. The fate of Father Zahm (serenely unconcerned with anything but his own comfort) was left, for the time being, to Providence.
FIVE PACKAGES THAT Roosevelt did not have to burden his mule with were the early chapters of his book for Scribners. Each had been handwritten on the same triple-carbon pads that he had used in British East Africa, and mailed to New York from post offices along the Paraguay. The last, “Up the River of Tapirs,” had gone off in care of Frank Harper. Roosevelt intended to dispatch two more before the expedition reached José Bonifácio. The rest, describing his actual descent of the Dúvida, he might as well take home with him.
No sooner had he left Tapírapoan than he began his sixth chapter, “Through the Highland Wilderness of Western Brazil,” with a sentence bound to attract the attention of armchair travelers:
We were now in the land of the bloodsucking bats, the vampire bats that suck the blood of living creatures, clinging to or hovering against the shoulder of a horse or cow, or the hand or foot of a sleeping man, and making a wound from which the blood continues to flow long after the bat’s thirst has been satiated.
He left Robert Bridges to cut the redundant second phrase, his indelible pencil eagerly moving on to other descriptions of tropical fauna. Jaguar or jaçanã, animal or bird, every species down to the tiniest insect was worthy of study, as were plants and flowers. Literary style mattered less, but occasionally, as in African Game Trails, he was capable of stretches of perfect prose:
Next morning* at sunrise we climbed a steep slope to the edge of the Parecis plateau, at a level of about two thousand feet above the sea. We were on the Plan Alto, the high central plain of Brazil, the healthy land of dry air, of cool nights, of clear, running brooks. The sun was directly behind us when we topped the rise. Reining in, we looked back over the vast Paraguayan marshes, shimmering in the long morning lights. Then, turning again, we rode forward, casting shadows far before us. It was twenty miles to the next water.… The ground was sandy; it was covered with grass and with a sparse growth of stunted, twisted trees, never more than a few feet high. There were rheas—ostriches—and small pampas-deer on this plain; the coloration of the rheas made it difficult to see them at a distance, whereas the bright-red coats of the little deer, and their uplifted flags as they ran, advertised them afar off.
The command detachment proceeded across the plain. There was no need for anyone to consult a compass, thanks to the bright filaments that Rondon and his engineers had strung westward. Even if a rider went astray in search of specimens or game, he could find his way back by listening for the humming of the wires.
A daily camp rhythm soon established itself. Early every morning a bugle sounded (Roosevelt sometimes adding his own reveille, a prolonged, Sioux-like Who-o-oo-oop-ee!). Then Juan, Rondon’s black orderly, went from tent to tent with coffee. Breakfast was served while the camaradas saddled up the pack animals. Each day’s trek was determined by the distance between available watercourses. Every